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

Ah, beautiful Toronto. I wasn't expecting to fall in love with this city as much as I did, but I really did. I met some fantastic people and had some great discussions about the use of social media for public engagement with science.* *disclaimer, there are lots of city skyline shots in this blog post.   I spent a good four days in Toronto exploring over the weekend and meeting with scientists and staff at the University of Toronto and speaking with the fantastic Social Media Lab at Ryerson University . I was invited to speak at the Ryerson University Social Media Lab about my Churchill Fellowship. I've included my slides and a YouTube video of my talk 'How scientists are using social media'  at the bottom of this post.  Toronto by day    Toronto by night The space they have in the Social Media Lab is great (it's based within offices once lived-in by Google). I tried out one of the 'chairs' in the image below although thankfull

Washington DC was a VERY HOT whirlwind of interesting conversations. new experiences and lots of lessons in American history. I think the time I spent in DC is going to spawn a number of blog posts focused on different topics but for now, here's what I got up to and my thoughts from DC. I've included a summary of my take home messages at the bottom of the post. First stop was the American Association of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology's ( ASBMB ) 'Hill Day'. This is where a group of scientists from the association meet with with their representatives, Senators and Congressmen to discuss their science and issues in funding. Benjamin Corb and the policy team at ASBMB do an excellent job of training the scientists in what to expect from their meetings with Senators and Congressmen, how to structure their short discussions and get the most out of them. It was fascinating to see the interaction between scientists and their representatives(and see the C

Following my post on measures of success on social media I read a paper on 'A critical evaluation of science outreach via social media: it's role and impact on scientists' published on the F1000 website which is well worth a read. The authors come to a similar conclusion my previous blog post, that the measurement of social media success needs to reach beyond simple number metrics in order to fully understand how beneficial (or not) social media channels are to academic researchers for outreach and their careers. The paper suggests three important elements which would allow the integration of social media for outreach (SOSM) into a scientists career which are: 1) It must be valued (by research funders and by universities) 2) It must be measured (the jury is still out on what this would look like) 3) It must be manageable I agree with the three elements but would also suggest that the efforts on social media must also feedback into the research to be truly usef

Follow my blog with Bloglovin So my thesis has been published online on the University of Aberdeen Library page. You can read it by clicking here .  It has the very snappy title 'GPR30 and ERα36 and their potential role in breast and endometrial cancers' This is my lay abstract: Oestrogen is a hormone that is mostly associated with the development of sexual organs and the female monthly menstrual cycle. However, it is also known to play a role in breast cancer. The presence of oestrogen can make some breast cancers grow and in the 1970s ‘anti-oestrogens’, like tamoxifen, were developed which have successfully prevented the growth of some breast cancers by blocking the action of oestrogen. Oestrogen causes this growth by binding to specific ‘receptors’ in the body. The anti-oestrogens work by blocking the oestrogen binding to the receptor. Some breast cancers do not have the receptors and therefore can’t be treated with anti-oestrogens. These types of cancers tend to be