Hi all, I’ve taken part in a couple of podcasts with the folks over at the Science Disrupt podcast recently.

The first of which involved me being part of their Disrupting Science Communication event. I was there talking vaccine communication while Prof Ruth Morgan talked on communicating forensic science and Dr Alice Bell talked about communicating the science of climate change. The other two speakers were both spectacular so it’s totally worth listening to the whole thing if you get a chance, however, if you’d just like to hear my lecture segment I’m the second speaker starting at around the 23 minute mark.

Episode 64: Disrupting The Conversation

The talk is quite fun but I do say “as you can see by the graph” about 20 million times so I’ve uploaded the slides to SlideShare so that you can follow along if you like.

The discussion panel part is good, but mainly it’s just the three of us saying “yeah, I totally agree”. It turns out climate change has the same issue with communicating the science as we do in vaccines, who’d have thought it!?

Here’s a couple of pictures from the event:

_{All images reproduced with permission from Gemma @sciencedisrupt}

After this, the Science Disrupt team (Gemma and Laurence, go follow them on twitter) invited me for more of an in depth interview covering my research and views on vaccine communication more generally.

This was by far the most out of my comfort zone I’ve been when it comes to communicating my work, but hey, they may have done one spectacular editing job and it might be worth a listen (I'll never know. No way could I ever stand listening to me trying to be an expert on something, I know me too well to be fooled by that act).

Episode 66: Vaccines: Tackling Viral Misinformation

The last question they ask me may have relevance to our community here on #steemstem.

I was asked: “How I would like to “disrupt” science communication?”

I answered that I would like to reward and compensate doctors and researchers for communicating their area of expertise to a wider audience. I didn’t bringing up #steemstem (as its hard to cram a full description of what the hell is going on here in a 30 seconds final thoughts answer), but it’s exactly what I thinking of at the time.

Which is why, currently, I am looking into ways I can work (at least part time, but perhaps fulltime!) on bringing academics and science communicators into the #steemstem community. I’ve some ideas which I will pitch here at sometime soon, but in the meantime, if you’ve any thoughts on what the best use of my time here would be please to get in touch.

First, however, I really need to (finally) finish my PhD and the current teaching work I’ve committed to, both of which should wrap up around the end of April. After that, I’ve an endless abyss of time that I quite like to fill with something weird, so here seems like as good a place as any!

About me

My name is Richard, I blog under the name of @nonzerosum. I’m a PhD student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I write mostly on the psychology of vaccine acceptance delay and refusal while occasionally dabbling in more general topics of public health. Here’s a selection of some of my past articles

From Anti-Vaxers to Alfie’s Army: Have we lost faith in medical science?

The State of Vaccine Confidence in 2018

A Frightened Public Scares Me: How empathy and fear can distort health policy

Redefining ‘Health’ for the 21st Century

Why We Vaccinate for Whooping Cough During Pregnancy

I am also a proud member of the #steemstem community. If this community is news to you can check out what they are all about here.