The Communicating Scientist - by Olle Bergman & Sarang Park & Joanna Bagniewska (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Are you a researcher, science professional, or student looking to communicate more clearly and effectively in academia and beyond? The Communicating Scientist has got you covered!

This essential guide consists of three easy-to-navigate sections:

1. Theoretical Framework: Plant your feet into a robust foundation that draws on areas from ancient rhetoric to modern psychology, while incorporating insights from marketing, social media, and journalism. This section equips you with the "why" behind effective communication.

2. Core Skills and Techniques: Build a central toolkit for communication activities of science and tech professionals, along with practical tips and suggestions.

3. A Practical Recipe Book: Get step-by-step instructions and hands-on tips from experts for 24 specific communication scenarios, as diverse as writing a grant proposal, developing an elevator pitch, doing a media interview, or curating an online presence.

This handbook isn't just another academic communication guide. The Communicating Scientist draws on the knowledge, experience, and tricks of the trade from professional communicators, while remaining strongly rooted in a scientific context. It will help you with scientific peer-to-peer communication, disseminating research to the general public, and collaborating with external partners. Written in a conversational and approachable style, The Communicating Scientist is accessible and appropriate for Communicating Scientists at all stages of their professional journey.

From the Back Cover

Are you a researcher, science professional, or student looking to communicate more clearly and effectively in academia and beyond? The Communicating Scientist has got you covered!

This essential guide consists of three easy-to-navigate sections:

1. Theoretical Framework: Plant your feet into a robust foundation that draws on areas from ancient rhetoric to modern psychology, while incorporating insights from marketing, social media, and journalism. This section equips you with the "why" behind effective communication.

2. Core Skills and Techniques: Build a central toolkit for communication activities of science and tech professionals, along with practical tips and suggestions.

3. A Practical Recipe Book: Get step-by-step instructions and hands-on tips from experts for 24 specific communication scenarios, as diverse as writing a grant proposal, developing an elevator pitch, doing a media interview, or curating an online presence.

This handbook isn't just another academic communication guide. The Communicating Scientist draws on the knowledge, experience, and tricks of the trade from professional communicators, while remaining strongly rooted in a scientific context. It will help you with scientific peer-to-peer communication, disseminating research to the general public, and collaborating with external partners. Written in a conversational and approachable style, The Communicating Scientist is accessible and appropriate for Communicating Scientists at all stages of their professional journey.

About the Author

Olle Bergman is a Swedish communication trainer, freelance writer, and author with a background in engineering and science. He received his degree in Chemical Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering, Lund University, in 1989. After spending three years in a wet lab context, working as a research assistant in neurochemistry and molecular biology, he entered a communications career. During some intense years in different professional positions, he learned the nuts and bolts of corporate and academic communication, as well as publishing and advertising, in a most practical way. After becoming a freelancer in the late nineties, Olle Bergman has mainly served customers in science, medicine, and tech. Typically, he helps his clients with copywriting and strategic planning, as well as coaching and lecturing on practical communication. Among his customers through the years are organizations like automotive manufacturer Scania, The Swedish Cancer Society as well as a number of universities, e.g. Lund University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Karolinska Institutet. In addition, Olle Bergman is the author of a dozen book titles--mainly history--and language-oriented non-fiction--in Swedish. As a member of the scholarship board of The Swedish Authors' Fund he has been dwelling on the question "How do you recognize a well-written text, and how should we define text quality?" Olle passed away in December 2023.

Sarang Park received her degree in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from Jacobs University Bremen in Bremen, Germany, in 2019. She played a central role in developing academic life for students, such as spearheading the Biochemistry and Cell Biology Society as its President and resuscitating the Jacobs University Bremen Undergraduate Newspaper as the Co-Editor-in-Chief. She has also led numerous projects such as jacobsHack! and TEDxJacobsUniversity. Throughout, she has accumulated eight years of teaching experience aiding numerous students and cultivating a love of learning as a freelancer and a consultant. Simultaneously, she acts as the social media manager of the largest science communication X (formerly Twitter) community, @IAmSciComm with 38K followers. Currently, she is attending medical school at Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, in Shanghai, China.

Dr. Joanna Bagniewska completed her undergraduate degree at Jacobs University Bremen and Rice University in Houston, and obtained her M.Sc. and doctorate from Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. After a stint at a start-up company, where she trained bees to detect illegal substances, Joanna went on to lecture at Nottingham Trent University, the University of Reading and Brunel University of London. Her academic interests include conservation biology, behavioral ecology and the intersection of technology and zoology. Joanna has worked on a number of species ranging from wombats and wallabies to mole-rats and jackals. She is an accomplished science communicator, having won British Council's FameLab Poland and the Wellcome-funded I'm a Scientist, get me out of here!, given a TEDx talk, and performed at science stand-up comedy events. She spent six years working as a Communications and Public Engagement Officer at Oxford University's Department of Paediatrics, and has been a science communication coach for the British Council. As a freelancer, she regularly writes popular science articles for various media in Polish (including Focus, Gazeta Wyborcza and Tygodnik Powszechny) and English (including TLS and BBC Wildlife), and has collaborated with the Discovery Channel on the How Do They Do It? series. Her first popular science book, The Modern Bestiary, was published in 2022. Joanna works as Co-Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Ecological Survey Techniques at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education.

Dr Dorota Paczesniak is a freelance scientific illustrator, educator and an evolutionary biologist. She studied biology and geography at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She completed her PhD at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, focusing her research on asexual reproduction in wild snail populations. She then continued working as a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Germany and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada to study evolutionary questions related to reproductive systems in plants. She has worked as a lecturer at ETH Zürich, Switzerland and the University of Oulu, Finland. She is an author of popular science articles and educational materials about evolution, genetics and plant breeding. As an illustrator, Dorota has designed a series of infographics about forest tree breeding for a public information campaign of the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and the University of Helsinki, illustrated a popular science book, and worked with many academic researchers to develop figures for scientific publications.