That sexual harassment, bullying, but also academic misconduct such as advisers plagiarizing their student’s work, happen in academia has never been a big secret. Rumors and scandals over the mistreatment of students, grad students, postdocs, and so on, have been accompanying my whole career. So called ‘whisper networks’ warn each other to stay away from certain professors.

And, where power differentials between members of a community are so large, abuse of power is probably not completely preventable.

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Open science for some people it is just science done correctly. For others it is the revolutionary change in the whole academic culture. These different perspectives are highly dependent on your views on the role of science in society, who your advisers were which fields your were in, which career stages you reached, and where you live and work.

In this episode I talk with Dr. Jon Tennant about open science. He is a paleontologist who is now predominantly active in building an Open Science community. He has published several articles on open science and initiated the Open Science MOOC, among many other activities.

Resources:

• Jon Tennant on Twitter
• The Open Science MOOC origin story “What Collaboration Means to Us: We are more powerful when we work together as a community to solve problems”
• Open Science MOOC
• Open Science MOOC Slack Community
• Welcome to the world of Open Science
• Open Source: The definition and the Four Freedoms

Dr. Dennis Eckmeier is a neuroscientist who ended his 13-year research career in 2018. He taught himself audio-visual communication during a year-long ‘self-financed sabbatical’. He is now available for hire  as a neuroscience consultant (including writing and editing) and science communicator.

Dennis founded Science for Progress in 2017, following his involvement with the March for Science in Lisbon, Portugal. His main goal is for society and governments to make good choices regarding policies that concern academia, or are more generally informed by science. To achieve this, he wants to support science communication projects and efforts to improve academia, and inform the public about policy-relevant science.

Dennis is also still passionate about neuroethology, the neuroscience of natural animal behaviors.

During his week on @sfprocur, Dennis will talk about Science for Progress, his experience as a researcher, and his work in podcasting and web video creation.

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Dr. Bart Geurten is a neuroscientist working as staff researcher at Göttingen University, Germany. There he learned how to work with genetic tools in the fruit fly. He is also co-host of the Science for Societal Progress podcast.

During his week as curator on @sfprocur, Bart will write about live as a postdoc, career and family issues.

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Pseudoscience is like a thorn in my brain. Besides being potentially dangerous when people rely on “alternative” “medicine” instead of finding actual help, sometimes it just bothers me when somebody is wrong on the internet. So it was time to relax a bit about it.

For this episode Bart and I tried something new. On Sunday, July 7th, we went on YouTube and played a game! We read pseudoscience stories to each other, trying to make the other guy laugh about it! And among the people who sent us their pseudoscience stories, we randomly chose a winner who got a t-shirt from our merchandize store!

Besides the edited podcast episode, you can also watch it on YouTube:

BART vs DENNIS LIVE! We are playing a pseudoscience game!

And you can win a T-Shirt from our store by sending us your funniest Pseudoscience story!

Team BART email: bart@scienceforprogress.eu

Team DENNIS email: dennis@scienceforprogress.eu

Dr. Helena Jambor is science writer at the university hospital of the Technical University in Dresden, Germany. Besides allowing her to learn about medical research, the work allows her to spend much of her time with figures and data visualization (DataViz).

Helena teaches DataViz in talks, blogs, and – hopefully soon – her book. And she offers consulting, too. Visual communication surrounds us everywhere in our modern lives. Arrows point the way, pictographs help us navigate public transport, logos communicate the brands’ preferred image, etc. Visualizations are also key to allow society to understand scientific research findings. To communicate their scientific findings to the public, and to engage in dialogue, scientists must learn to produce visualizations that are understandable. This applies when communicating to journalists, teachers, and politicians, but also within the scientific community.

During her curation at @sfprocur, Helena wants to convey how scientists use DataViz 1) to unambiguously communicate data within the scientific community; 2) to handle bigger and bigger data sets that require effective visualizations to be analysed; 3) to engage with society about their findings. She would like to initiate a discussion about a DataViz curriculum and spark interest in this important topic.

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Dmitry Kopelyanskiy is a PhD candidate in immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is also a passionate science communicator who believes that science belongs to everyone and should never be boring or overly complicated.

In his week at @SfPRocur, he will share his experiences in popularizing science via outreach events, science festivals, and online. “Science can be very interesting, inspiring and even fun. Dare to try it yourself!”  

For this episode I speak with Dr. Rüdiger Eichel, professor for Materials and Processes for Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage at the RWTH Aachen University, and Scientific Director for the Institute for Energy and Climate Research at the Research Center Jülich in Germany.

Dr. Eichel gives us an insight into the chances and challenges of the Energiewende. The new found interest in climate issues in the public that can be seen in the Fridays for Future movement and the outcomes of the EU parliament elections, make him optimistic. He now sees the chance to talk with society about the technical possibilities to switch to fully renewable energy sources, how long it might take to implement, and how much it might cost financially and in terms of living quality.

Once a month Bart Geurten and I talk about current topics in the Bart and Dennis (“B&D”) series. This time we talk about the success of the Greens in the EU parliament elections, homeopathy, and postdocs.

Announcement

And we have a big announcement: On July 7th we will do a live episode on YouTube! For the show we want to play a little game. And for this to work, we need you cooperation! Send us your weirdest/funniest parascience or pseudoscience stories or soundbites! You can support either Bart or Dennis by sending your story to bart@scienceforprorgess.eu, or dennis@scienceforprogress.eu, respectively. We will randomly select a winner from all entries, who will get a free t-shirt form our merchandise store!