Communicating Your Ideas-NERC

I was recently awarded a grant from NERC (UK Natural Environment Research Council) along with two colleagues at the University of Manchester. I was impressed on several fronts.

1) I believe one of the reasons that the proposal was funded was because of the strong “impacts” section that we wrote where we would convey our research results to the public, to other scientists, and to forecasters, both within the UK and throughout Europe.

2) The public in the UK seems to have a much larger appetite for science than I have seen in the United States. There are many science programs on the TV, there is a national science week, and annual science festivals in many major cities. See this example by Andrew Russell from the Manchester Science Fair in October.

3) With the acceptance letter, I received a booklet called Communicating Your Ideas: How to Tell the Non-Specialist About Your Research. It is a pithy document aimed at the busy scientist. That NERC would send this document to all scientists who they fund shows the level of importance that they place on communicating science to the public.

4) This booklet is just a damn nice document. I wish I had known about it when writing Eloquent Science.

Fortunately, you don’t have to earn a £435,000 research grant to get the 18-page booklet. Download it here for free.