Question: How do you tell people about your friends' experiments?

Evelyn Greeves answered on 13 Jul 2020:

Hi Mikkel! There are lots of different ways I tell people about the work my colleagues do.

• Things like this! Talking to people face to face (or virtually, in this case) is often called public engagement. Before lockdown, most of the public engagement I did happened when school groups visited our laboratory to look around and do some fun activities. Currently, this is the main way I interact with young people like you, although we have been running some online virtual tours which are super fun to do!
• Using written articles, a bit like a newspaper article. A big part of my job is researching and writing articles for our website, or for our newsletter. The difference is that the website is public. The newsletter is just for people who work at the same place.
• Using leaflets and posters. This is one of my favourite ways to communicate our work because I like designing the leaflets to look really cool and catch people’s eye. You can use fun pictures and graphics which makes the text more interesting. Also, leaflets can be taken to events and handed out for people to take home, which makes them more likely to read and remember the information inside.
• Using infographics. If you don’t know what an infographic is then I highly recommend you check out informationisbeautiful.net. Infographics are a way to display data (usually numbers) in a cool way, like a graph or chart. They’re much more exciting than the graphs you might draw at school though! They can look really beautiful and capture people’s imagination.
• Using social media like twitter. I use twitter to share articles from our website and help them reach a wider audience. I also use it to share fun facts about our work, and tell people about our history too (for example, the animations for the classic Sci-Fi film ‘Alien’ were made using one of our supercomputers!).

That’s just some of the ways I communicate our science to people. I’m really interested in using newer platforms such as TikTok or podcasts to reach different people. What’s your favourite way to learn about science?