Heather Doran

I graduated from my PhD some time ago now. I moved away from research when my funding expired and after a lot of decision making and deliberating I took a post in Public Engagement at the University of Aberdeen. I started in late 2012 and I've really been enjoying it so far. I am involved with planning, organising and running lots of public engagement events along with speaking to researchers about the many different ways they can engage with the public, how to bring the public into research, a bit of training and also discussing how to use social media as a researcher (which I really enjoy). It wasn't an easy decision and I didn't discuss it on this blog at the time for a number of reasons. There was a post-doc opportunity too but that was in Canada and I wanted to stay in Scotland as my (now) husband is based here and I decided that I wanted to move full time into public engagement. I knew that I would enjoy the role and it seemed that this option would lead to a muc

Yesterday I visited the Tycho Brahe Museum on the tiny island of Ven or Hven in Sweden. I'm going to write more about Tycho Brahe and the museum but for now (and the observatory he built in the 1500s).. here's a little descriptor from the gardens explaining how even in the 1500s it was important to disseminate research knowledge... and that Tycho the scientist didn't trust the people that printed his works. So he built his own printing press and printed it himself. Uraniborg was Tycho's castle and the museum is based around where it once stood.

These are the slides I used for the session on social media and the PhD at the  PhD Journey Conference  in Aberdeen.     If you are interested in learning more about social media you might want to look at my: online tools for conferences how to use twitter

Struggling to decide what to do after you finish your PhD? Try out my handy, 'nofuss-science-career-decider'. Start the process by clicking the link and saying, 'HELLO'  http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=83872e8cfe34cd1d