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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Innovator Stories – Episode 3
Episode pub date: 2019-06-01

What makes an innovator in the world of disrupting science? What sort of experiences, behaviours and mindsets prompt people to make change, and guard them against the challenges that changing the status quo inevitably brings?

Those were the questions on our mind for this first episode of our ‘Innovator Stories’ mini-series on the Science: Disrupt podcast.

Over the next 5 episodes of Science: Disrupt, you’ll hear from those at the coal face, enacting change within science – whether that’s building new products, changing behaviour in the lab or simply being more vocal in the scientific community, we wanted to bring to the fore some of the ‘behind the scenes’ insights into what makes innovation happen.

This episode features:

• Cindy Wu, Co-Founder of Experiment. Experiment is a crowdfunding platform that allows anyone to participate on the scientific process by backing their chosen research project. In exchange not only do funders get to see research flourish but get to share in the scientific content produced through lab notes produced for that funding community.
• Monica Grenados, a policy analyst and food web ecologist. Monica is active in the open science community through her work on the leadership team at PREreview and as a mentor for the Mozilla Open Leaders. PREreview is a platform that hosts preprint reviews and shares them openly with everyone, they also are great advocates of getting preprints into the traditional academic journal club.
• Naomi Penfold, associate director of ASAPbio a non-profit that promotes transparency and innovation in life science communication. Naomi is involved in engaging the scientific community promoting the use of preprints to ensure the science actually gets outs of the lab in a reasonable time frame and is available to all.

The series is supported by the awesome team at Digital Science’s Catalyst Grant – they’re constantly searching for the next big thing in scientific research software. To help nurture original, early stage ideas they created the Catalyst Grant where they offer up to £25,000 to help get your idea from concept to prototype. So, if you’ve got an idea to help further scientific research, then they’ve got the funding and resources to bring it to life. The next deadline for submission is June 30th, so get to it!

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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Episode 43: Getting to Science 2.0
Episode pub date: 2017-09-29

This episode Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media joins us in a far reaching conversation spanning the whole science ecosystem. From the communication of science, to liberating knowledge generated by research from the confines of the static PDF, to the mutual learning experience of colliding technologists and academics,

Tim has been regarded as a thought leader in Silicon Valley over the past few decades, popularising the terms open source and web 2.0. So we were interested to see how he believes the rapid technological advancement of late could impact science and academic culture.. 

O’Reilly Media also operates an awesome conference called SciFoo. The event is a partnership between O’Reilly, Google, Digital Science, and the Nature Publishing Group which brings together an interdisciplinary cohort of scientists, as well as technologists and policy makers, so it was great to hear how Tim feels collaboration can be done in the 21st century. 

 

** You can get more information on Digital Science’s Catalyst Grant here **

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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Episode 70: How to Write our Future
Episode pub date: 2019-05-25

In this episode we chat to science fiction author, Anne Charnock. For Anne’s latest novel “Dreams Before the Start of Time” received the Arthur C Clarke award in 2018, and explores the future of fertility, and pre-natal genetic screening. Anne was also a Phillip K Dick Award nominee for here 2013 novel “A Calculated Life”.

It’s becoming more and more clear that sci-fi and futurism can have great influence in our culture. In our chat with Anne we dive into the role of sci-fi as a launchpad for scientific exploration, the ethical obligations of the writer, the power of daydreaming, and how writers balance literary freedom with the maintenance of good grounded science. 

Relevant links:

• Anne’s website & twitter 
• Anne’s chat with Elsa Sotiriadis at Hello Tomorrow (video) We also have this piece: ‘Why Science Needs Fiction‘ showcasing Elsa’s sci-fi recommended reading

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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Innovator Stories – Episode 1
Episode pub date: 2019-03-29

What makes an innovator in the world of disrupting science? What sort of experiences, behaviours and mindsets prompt people to make change, and guard them against the challenges that changing the status quo inevitably brings?

Those were the questions on our mind for this first episode of our ‘Innovator Stories’ mini-series on the Science: Disrupt podcast.

Over the next 5 episodes of Science: Disrupt, you’ll hear from those at the coal face, enacting change within science – whether that’s building new products, changing behaviour in the lab or simply being more vocal in the scientific community, we wanted to bring to the fore some of the ‘behind the scenes’ insights into what makes innovation happen.

This episode features:

• Michele Nuitjen, Assistant Professor at Tilburg University
• Leslie McIntosh, Co-Founder and CEO of Ripeta
• Freyja Olafsdottir, Neuroscientist at the Donders Institute

The series is supported by the awesome team at Digital Science’s Catalyst Grant – they’re constantly searching for the next big thing in scientific research software. To help nurture original, early stage ideas they created the Catalyst Grant where they offer up to £25,000 to help get your idea from concept to prototype. So, if you’ve got an idea to help further scientific research, then they’ve got the funding and resources to bring it to life. The next deadline for submission is June 30th, so get to it!

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Science: Disrupt, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Episode 69: Data Driven Discovery
Episode pub date: 2019-04-10

In this episode we chat to Charles Fracchia, CEO and Co-Founder of BioBright a bioscience data company driven to make labs faster and smarter. Showing that building out a smart lab isn’t the preserve of the roboticists, Biobright hoovers up every drop of experimental data with a view to make science more reproducible. Their product ‘DarwinSync’ can hook up to you electronic lab notebooks, be searched through voice, and can even help with the analysis and visualisation of lab data.

Charles’ CV reads like a who’s who of science innovation, from his IBM PhD Fellowship in the MIT Media Lab, to working in George Church’s lab at the Wyss Institute. He was also an early intern at Ginkgo Bioworks. He’s even been named one of 35 Innovators Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review.

Relevant articles:

• All about BioBright
• Charles’ Site
• A feature in Scientific American on reproducibility
• Labiotech piece on lab automation

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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Episode 57: Experimenting with Crowdfunding
Episode pub date: 2018-07-17

This week we chat to Cindy Wu and Denny Luan, co-founders of Experiment, the science crowdfunding platform. 

We talk about the underappreciated power of small chunks of funding in science, different methods of sharing science, and bonding over super-smash bros.

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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Episode 66: Vaccines: Tackling Viral Misinformation
Episode pub date: 2019-02-10

In today’s episode we are joined by Richard Clarke, a PhD researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine! Richard is a member of the the Vaccine Confidence Project, an initiative that monitors public confidence in immunisation for the purpose of detecting public concerns around vaccines. These concerns can have massive implications for the effectiveness of vaccine programmes and as such researchers must address them as early as possible.

In this episode we explore what researchers can do to effectively communicate science on-and-off-line (it turns out caps lock, insults, and twitter mobs aren’t very convincing…), and the results of his research that suggests that on the whole people are less vulnerable to online pseudoscience than we might think. We also chat about his involvement in the Skeptic community, and the role that public trust in authority plays in vaccine hesitancy.

Richard’s PhD focusses on the information seeking behaviours of mothers as they make a vaccine decision during pregnancy. In his studies Richard applies research from the psychology of decision making, trust and the field of information science to quantitatively investigate how mothers engage in information gathering to aid decision making with respect to the pertussis vaccine currently offered during pregnancy. 

• Richard’s Twitter
• The Vaccine Confidence Project
• Richard spoke at our ‘Disrupting the Conversation’ event in December. The audio for the event was released for as Episode 64
• The Vaccine Knowledge Project
• Skeptics in the Pub

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Podcast: Science: Disrupt
Episode: Episode 54: The Road to Open Science Hardware
Episode pub date: 2018-03-29

We’re back from a little pod hiatus!

In this episode we spoke to Dr Jenny Molloy, a Cambridge Synthetic Biologist who, among many things, is the Director of the Cambridge Biomakespace, and is on the organising committee for the Gathering for Open Science Hardware. 

We spoke about her work in developing the GOSH manifesto, and the recently released Open Science Hardware Roadmap which advocates for open science hardware as a ubiquitous component of everyday lab life. We also dove into the space that hardware fits into, in the ever active Open Science community. How do the open hardware advocates differ from those keen to shake up academic publishing.

We were also keen to find out more on how open science hardware projects are disseminated, not just to the fellow academics but to the wider public at large. And how this area of ‘science disruption’ could have a massive impact on the reproducibility of research.

The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Science: Disrupt, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.