LN: Hello, welcome to this Medical Research Council podcast. I'm Laura Nelson and I'm in Liverpool at the BA Festival of Science 2008. It's been a week of events, talks and activities, all aimed at helping the public understand and engage with science. One of the highlights has been the Research Council UK's funded perspectives competition involving 36 scientists who have been busy designing and producing posters that communicate their research and the impact it has on society. The scientists were picked from an array of applicants and attended workshops to get tips on developing their posters.
At the festival itself they have been standing in front of their posters answering questions from inquisitive members of the public. I caught up with Jamie Brown an MRC funded PhD student in the department of experimental psychology, University of Cambridge. He investigates the role of learning in autism spectrum disorders. Jamie won the runner up prize in the competition.
JB: Well my poster was called learning secrets from autism and yeah the posters were all about the social and ethical impact of your work in communicating that to other scientists and lay audiences. So yeah I was trying to get across what challenges people with autism face and kind of how maybe my research might help to solve that, but other things that we need to consider as well. So things like autism's obviously a spectrum so any findings we get, how sure can we be they generalise across the range and obviously autism by definition is a social disorder and are we sure they're willing and informed participants as well. And we sure they're getting something out of it as well. Obviously the research's long term aims is to feed back into treatment and things like that. LN: Sure and your poster's really striking, it's a big picture of a child's face and what made you come to that decision to use that photo? JB: I was browsing the resources, ones with appropriate imagery rights on Flickr and Google and some stock photo websites and I kind of just came across that and it just struck me and I thought that would be really appropriate, so I played around with it a bit in Photoshop and made up the poster.
LN: And what about your experience in standing and talking to the public about your work? What did you learn from that?
JB: It was really interesting actually, it kind of teaches you you really need to engage when you're talking to people and find out what kind of angle they're coming from, what questions they want answering and what kind of level of expertise or what kind of angle they're coming from. My typical academic conference experience is I kind of very much have a spiel in my head what I'm going to say, what I want to communicate with my research, but after seeing a couple of people here I realised it's much more kind of finding out what they want to hear about your research and then trying to think on your feet and coming up with what they want to know. LN: Laura Nelson JB: Jamie Brown
