Written by Kim Townsend, Public Engagement Coordinator (East),  UCL Museums & Public Engagement

UCL’s Public Engagement Unit is currently working hard to build relationships and engage with the public in East London.

As part of this, I attended an event called Creating Connections, which was held in Stratford, East London. Creating Connections is the name of a series of events that are designed to bring together UCL staff and students with representatives from community organisations, charities, residents’ groups and social enterprises, with the aim of finding ways to work together.

Around 60 people gathered in University Square, Stratford for the event, which included themed discussion groups – covering topics like ‘How urban planning affects local communities’, and ‘Supporting health improvements in East London’ – there were also informal networking opportunities over drinks, giving a chance for the East London community to find shared areas of interest with UCL’s academics and students.

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Michael Arthur

What do a supernova discoverer, a sex researcher, a chemistry demonstrator, a doctor of fluid dynamics, a materials scientist/engineer, a toilet festival and a history project about slave ownership have in common?

As well as being a brilliant microcosm of the breadth of activity and expertise bubbling away at UCL, they were all recipients of UCL Communication & Culture Awards at an event on 2 April in the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre.

Organised by UCL Museums and Public Engagement, UCL Communications and Marketing and the UCL Development and Alumni Relations Office, this is the first time that the awards have taken place.

They were designed to recognise the hard work that the UCL community put in to sharing their research, teaching and learning through media and cultural partnerships – to include activities such as television, radio, blogging, festivals, public events, arts projects and exhibitions.

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Citizen science is something that has undergone a major revival in the past 10 years or so and in the Lunch Hour Lecture on 22 January, Professor Muki Haklay explained why and where the field is going.

The iBats logo

It may sound like a load of middle-aged men playing with chemistry sets but actually citizen science has encompassed some great thinkers. Like say… Charles Darwin, I imagine you’re familiar with his work?

Darwin wasn’t affiliated with any university or other organisation; in fact, he was only on HMS Beagle as a companion to the captain rather than in any professional capacity.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1833 that William Whewell coined the word ‘scientist’ to distinguish the professional from the amateur. He used interested amateurs to collect data relating to tidal patterns and likened himself to the jeweller who strung these ‘pearls’ of information together to make the necklace.

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“There are massive f***ing error bars on every adjective I’m going to use tonight.”

Those are the words every scientist wants to hear at the start of a comedy night. We like to be assured that all the jokes we’re about to hear have been properly tested and subjected to significance testing.  Of course, if the error bars are massive then the results probably aren’t significant – but we won’t go into that.

So this was Science Showoff, a monthly open mic night for scientists, science communicators, science historians or anyone else in any way connected with the scientific world to come and be funny whilst talking about what they love. It’s a monthly event which has been running for just over a year and 7November saw the biggest Showoff to date in the Bloomsbury Theatre.

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