Heather Doran

In November I created a poster for the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement ENGAGE Conference  . It was designed for the 'poster encounter' session which they run every year and summarised my top 10 for social media engagement, taken from my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship. As lots of people were interested in taking a photo of my poster I thought I should share it on my blog too. I've also supported the NCCPE in creating their WHAT WORKS Guide to Engaging the Public through Social Media and my Fellowship Report also supported the creation of this. It launched in November and it's a great guide which covers the main networks, content generation and evaluation. Well worth a read if you are interested in social media for engagement. In 2019 I will be launching a number of citizen science projects and using social media as a tool and a support network to do this. Follow what I am up to at the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science

For the second part of my Churchill Fellowship I took the train from Boston to New Haven, the home of Yale University. I caught up with scientists in the Geology and Geophysics group, visited the amazing Peabody Museum (definitely one of my new favourite museums - more below) and met up with science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer. I was extremely grateful to Carl for giving up some time to meet with me. I think it is important to speak with communicators as well as scientists as they are experts in knowing both how science works and also how to engage the public about science. We spoke about how the low barrier to entry on social media (no cost, no paperwork) makes it easy for scientists to put themselves out there online. But, how they choose to use social media platforms is up to them. The Yale Graduate building For Carl, he said the use of social media by scientists is interesting as you can see what really excites them about the work they are doing. Scientists share whe

I packed my bags and headed to Boston this week for the first part of my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to investigate how scientists are using social media to connect with the public. Here's a round-up of the first part of my trip There were stunning views from the flight all the way to Boston. Hotel accommodation in Boston is super-expensive so I tried out Airbnb for the first time. It was really easy to find an Airbnb place located half-way between Harvard and MIT in Cambridge despite the lack of affordable hotels in this area. The apartment is lovely and my hosts were great. I'm definitely going to be using Airbnb more. I was pretty exhausted after the flight and so having a nice place to relax and rest was just what I needed. Cambridge is a great area full of coffee shops and leafy streets. I got to know the area well on foot. It's easy to navigate and feels like around every corner is a lovely coffee shop, perfect for a cup-of tea and a t