Science blog

Applications now open

The British Library is currently running a series of 3-month (or PT equivalent) PhD Placements, to be hosted by specialist curatorial teams and other Library experts.  Of the 17 placements on offer, this opportunity will be of particular interest to PhD students with interests in science, science policy and the social perception of scientific issues.

Science in Society

Working within the Research Engagement Team, the placement student will have the opportunity to organise and deliver a TalkScience event on a topic relevant to scientific policy.  TalkScience is well-established, highly successful series of public debates organised by and held at the British Library. Previous topics have ranged from the use of personalised genomics to science education in schools.

A previous TalkScience event

The placement student will also have the opportunity to use the Library’s collections in relation to science and its social perceptions, for example by working with the Web Archive Team to produce a special online collection related to science and science policy.  Additionally, placement students can also get involved with a number of activities across the Research Engagement Team, such as contributing to research reports or social media activity. 

We have hosted Science in Society interns in previous years. You can read more about their projects here:

Stuart Smith (BBSRC intern, 2012)

Adam Levy (NERC intern, 2014)

Rachel Huddart (BBSRC intern, 2014)

Further information

The application deadline for all of the PhD placements is Friday 19 February 2016.

Further information, including eligibility criteria and details on the application process, can be found here:

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/highered/phd-placement-scheme 

All applications must be supported by the applicant’s PhD supervisor and their department’s Graduate Tutor (or equivalent). Please forward any questions to: [email protected]

Eleanor Sherwood

Research Engagement PhD Placement Student

Applications are now open for RCUK Policy Internships at the British Library at 2016. We are offering up to three NERC/MRC funded PhD students the chance to join us in team ScienceBL and help deliver a TalkScience event. In this blog post former intern Stuart Smith reflects on his Policy Internship placement at the British Library.

Stuart (red hat and trousers) in the Falkland islands (Photo: Marju Karlsson)

After finishing my BBSRC policy placement at the British Library in July 2013 and wrapping up my PhD thesis, I went in search of a job. Wishing to find a job that balanced both ecological research and public engagement, I was finally offered a 2-year position leading a Darwin Initiative funded project that aims to build capacity to enhance habitat restoration in the Falklands Islands. Despite only being a small island in sub-Antarctica, with a total population of around 3,000 people, there has consistently been a need to communicate scientific and environmental issues effectively. Working for Falklands Conservation, I have established an island-wide re-vegetation trial using native seeds and I regularly talk about my work to people with a range of backgrounds: farmers, landowners, policymakers, researchers, members of the public and military personnel. And while I might not have the opportunity to get a BBC presenter to pop down to lead a panel debate, like I did my when organising a TalkScience event at the British Library, I find myself involved in outreach activity on a weekly basis, whether writing an article for the Penguin News, the local newspaper, or giving a lesson on seeds or habitat restoration in a school. 

Bill Turnbull chairing the TalkScience that Stuart developed and delivered as part of his Policy Internship at the British Library

Following on from work on the Falkland Islands, I am about to start a post-doctoral position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway as part of AfricanBioServices, an EU funded project, and will be working in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in Tanzania/Kenya. My involvement in the project is to investigate the effect of different land-uses (both wild grazing versus domestic pastoral grazing) on grassland productivity and ecosystem functioning. Again, this role is likely to require excellent communication skills to a wide range of audiences from scientists involved in the international consortium to farmers and landowners on the ground. Even though I am still actively involved in ecological research, the essential skills of effective science communication and outreach are highly valued. The British Library has an incredibly supportive and friendly team and were happy to take on an ecologist, who particularly struggled to wear a tie. I would recommend that every postgraduate should take the opportunity to learn an increasingly important set of skills involved in outreach and public engagement and apply for a science policy placement.

Stuart Smith, BBSRC Science Policy Intern 2013

Rachel Huddart looks back on the last three months working with the British Library Science Team

I decided to apply for a BBSRC Science Policy internship on a whim while traveling to a conference in Hungary. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made so far. As competition for an increasingly small number of postdoctoral positions increases, having a chance to get out of the lab environment and discover what opportunities there are outside of academia is a fantastic boost to your future career. Turns out there are a lot.

While I’ve been here at the British Library, I’ve worked on two main projects. The first one was the TalkScience event ‘Biotech on the Farm: Food for Thought?’ which looked at the future of meat production and consumption. My PhD is about the genetic modification of livestock animals and organising TalkScience gave me a great opportunity to take a step back from my thesis and look at the bigger picture of food security and sustainability. Researching the topic was fascinating (you can read a brief summary of what I learned here), although staring at pictures of delicious food – which get used a lot in food security reports – did make me incredibly hungry!

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had four fantastic speakers who agreed to be on the panel and, despite my initial nerves, the debate was lively, interesting and informative. The audience seemed to enjoy it and posed lots of interesting questions, including asking whether we could get our pets to cut down on the amount of meat they eat. I definitely learnt a lot about where my work fits into the bigger picture as well as the myriad other factors which are at play in our struggle to have a secure, sustainable supply of meat. The video of the event is below, if you want to check it out for yourself.

My second task was to help the Science team with a project investigating how people working in science policy access information. This project is still in the early stages but it gave me the chance to visit other science policy organisations and learn about their work. It’s been really interesting to learn how much information, other than scientific articles, go into producing policy documents and how varied that information is as well as what barriers people working in science policy encounter when they look for information.

But that hasn’t been all. I’ve learned about so many other things from the life of Isaac Newton to the basics of writing computer code. By now, you’ve probably guessed that work here at the British Library is incredibly varied and always interesting. I’ve gained lots of new skills and brushed up on some older ones, like writing for non-academic audiences. I’m so pleased that I decided to do this internship (and even more pleased that the Science team agreed to take me on!) and now I can’t wait to see how I use everything I’ve learned in my future career

Rachel Huddart

Are you a NERC, BBSRC or AHRC- funded PhD student interested in science policy? Find out more about the Policy Internship scheme here.

Related articles

TalkScience @BL - Biotech on the Farm: Food for Thought?

My Internship with the British Library Science Team

Isaac Newton is calling you...

This week we are excited to announce the launch of a data visualisation competition (and workshop), sponsored by the AHRC and BBSRC

We talk quite a lot about data on the Science Blog and have previously highlighted the role we are playing in helping researchers to discover, access or cite scientific data. But working at the British Library means we have the fantastic opportunity to bring our collections and contemporary research to the wider public through our exhibitions. Earlier in the year we gave you a taster of Beautiful Science  - an exhibition launching in February 2014, that will explore scientific data visualisation from past to present. Some famous historical names, such as Florence Nightingale, knew the power of displaying data – her iconic diagram (pictured) not only enabled any viewer to quickly grasp the meaning but led to changes in the way those injured in war were treated.

As part of our celebration of all things data and our exhibition, we have been working with the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council on a competition that challenges entrants to bring UK Research Council data to life. An added bonus - we hope - is that the competition aims to encourage people from different disciplines to work together, since presenting complex data not only requires mathematical, computing or scientific skills but strong expertise in art and design. A key criteria for the judges will be whether the entries convey the meaning to a wide audience and so they will be looking for that combination of valid data that tells a compelling story.

Around £3 billion of Government funding is apportioned annually between the seven UK Research Councils, which are responsible for different discipline areas. The Research Councils then distribute that funding to their various communities on the basis of applications made by researchers, which are subject to independent, expert peer review. Applications are judged by considering a combination of factors, including their scientific excellence, timeliness and promise, strategic relevance, economic and social impacts, industrial and stakeholder relevance, value for money and staff training potential. Until recently it wasn’t easy to combine funding data from different Research Councils or to explore how it was distributed across the country. And the finer grained detail, while it may have been available from an individual Council, was difficult to tease out or integrate. Behind the scenes, Research Councils worked together to make details of the research they fund available from one place. The culmination of that commitment is Gateway to Research - a database that anyone can use. The data is available programmatically and under an open government licence which means that anyone is free to interrogate it – you can extract it all, download it to your own systems, apply your own analysis tools and generally think of things to do with it that no one else has done before.

The challenge of the competition is to use the Gateway to Research data to tell a compelling story that anyone will be able to understand. While designers, graphic artists, software developers and programmers may have a particular interest, anyone and everyone is invited to produce a visualisation (on a website) that will show how this public funding contributes to research in the UK. Details of the competition are here. Entries forms will be available from 27 January 2014 and the closing date is 21 March 2014. Our judges include Jackie Hunter, Chief Executive, BBSRC, Katy Borner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science, Indiana University and Guardian Digital Agency.

On 24 January 2014, we are holding a workshop at the British Library for anyone who wants to find out more. Please register if you want some inspiration, information about the Gateway to Research database and to meet potential collaborators. Representatives from the AHRC and BBSRC will be there on the day, as well as data visualisation evangelists (Guardian Digital Agency) and developers (Cottage Labs) who have worked with the data. We will also have Andrew Steele from Scienceogram who is using public data to make the case for science in the UK.

Lee-Ann Coleman

From organising a public debate to writing-up science conferences and festivals, my time as part of the science team at the British Library is at an end. My placement followed on from first BBSRC intern, Catriona Manville who became the ‘poster-girl’ for the BBSRC placement programme in 2012. Even though it was never really a competition, after three months at the British Library could I be the next BBSRC ‘poster-boy’?

Stuart [me], surveying a grazing exclosure on the Beinn Eighe nature reserve in Scotland. Photo by Kyle Munro.

Before my internship I was writing-up my PhD thesis in Biological Science at the University of Aberdeen, but I wanted some experience in science policy. A placement at the British Library was appealing as an intermediary between interacting with policy makers and the general public. To that effect, I have attended as many meetings, workshops, conferences as possible; from the British Science Association Science Communication conference to a day talking to MPs at the House of Commons with the Society of Biology. For many of the events I attended, I wrote articles or blog posts to share what I learned. For example, I attended my first ever festival (and kept my wristband to prove it!) - the Cheltenham Science Festival - and helped write an article in their newspaper, Litmus paper.

Spot Stuart during TalkScience@BL ‘Pollinators and pesticides: is there a plan bee?’ Photo: Peter Warner.

The pinnacle of the placement has been organising TalkScience. This is a quarterly evening event, similar in format to a café scientifique. After reading the news, policy briefings, publications and reports, we decided our next TalkScience topic would be on issues surrounding the potentially harmful effect of pesticides on insect pollinators. “Pollinators and pesticides: is there a plan bee?”  was chaired by Bill Turnbull, BBC presenter and beekeeper in discussion with the panel comprising Dr David Aston (British Beekeepers Association), Dr Peter Campbell (Syngenta) and Dr Lynn Dicks (University of Cambridge). Even greater public outreach was gained via Bill hosting a BBC Horizon programme about demystifying the bees - leading to the event being filmed by the BBC. Keep your eyes peeled on BBC2 on 2 August at 21.00 and you might see a few shots of the event!

Being part of the British Library science team was a large learning curve and has increased my awareness of activities supporting, using and extending scientific research. For example, I gained new insights into Open Access and how recent policy changes are influencing libraries, funders, publishers and researchers. Even on a day-to-day basis, the transition from PhD student to science outreach is a change in mind-set and routine.

•    Preparing for a monthly supervisor meeting to participating in daily meetings with a wide range of people
•    Preparing for a single yearly conference to attending a conference every few weeks
•    Focusing on a single specific area of science to following multiple disciplines
•    Expanding sources of information from primarily research articles to journal and society news, policy briefings and blogs/Twitter!

A typical internship job at the British Library; fixing the life support system in the office to stop rising CO2 concentration killing the team! This was a team away day at the Leicester Space Centre.

Should I become the next ‘poster-boy’? To be honest, as a PhD student, I feel lucky to have experienced my fair share of media engagement with BBC Horizon. There are many scientists, societies and government advisors completely immersed in outreach and policy that deserve more recognition. Undertaking a placement at the British Library has been a rewarding experience in itself and I would encourage future PhD students to consider the opportunity.

Stuart Smith is a PhD student studing the effect of livestock grazing on the carbon cycle at the University of Aberdeen and has finished his internship as part of the BBSRC policy placement scheme.