Science Communication Summer School keynote

Title: ‘Science Communication: its Principles and Possibilities’

Background: The lecture is open to all and is part of the Imperial College/Jagiellonian science communication summer school. I will examine the practical benefits of good science communication, both to researchers and to the public, and I will frame this as a ‘whole university’ project, something all academics and students can get involved in. The scope of the lecture will therefore include elements of philosophy, the social sciences and the arts, as well as science itself. It will look at current controversies in science communication, such as vaccine hesitancy and the questions over AI. My key question is: how can science best find its way in society?

Dr Stephen Webster is Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London. His degrees are in zoology and in the philosophy of science. Stephen was for 13 years a school science teacher, before becoming co-director of the diploma in science communication, at Birkbeck College University of London. He joined Imperial in 1999 and was director of the Science Communication Unit from 2008 until earlier this year. Currently Stephen is leading The Good Science Project, an initiative at Imperial that explores the challenges and ethical issues of contemporary research culture, especially in science.

Stephen has published widely in different formats, including childrens’ non-fiction, radio plays for the BBC, radio science documentaries, a weather column for The Guardian, the libretto for the opera Darwin’s Dream and a short biography of Charles Darwin. His academic books are the edited collection The Silences of Science (Routledge 2016) and the textbook Thinking About Biology (Cambridge 2003).