Dr Robin Morton works as science communication manager at the University of Edinburgh at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine in the Institute for Regeneration and Repair. Robin started his research career as a scientist working in neuroscience for his PhD, then doing a Postdoc in learning and memory. Robin then “jumped into industry” for several years before returning to an academic environment, where he had the opportunity of working in different project management roles.
He shares his path into working as a science communication manager and provides some valuable ideas about how researchers/ research leaders may want to explore perspectives about the role of research communication.
This will get you thinking about:
· When is the right time to get started with your research communication?
· Why seeing yourself as a science/research communicator is just part of
the job?
· Who could your audience be?
· What is gained from deep listening and 2-way communication?
· How you may get surprised by the possibilities that engaging research participants may bring?
Access all podcasts and show notes from: https://tesselledevelopment.com/podcast
Register on our mailing list to receive Podcast updates: https://tesselledevelopment.activehosted.com/f/5
Get in touch for questions, queries or to suggest a brilliant contributor: sandrine@tesselledevelopment.com
Dr Robin Morton works as science communication manager at the University of Edinburgh at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine in the Institute for Regeneration and Repair. Robin started his research career as a scientist working in neuroscience for his PhD, then doing a Postdoc in learning and memory. Robin then “jumped into industry” for several years before returning to an academic environment, where he had the opportunity of working in different project management roles.
He shares his path into working as a science communication manager and provides some valuable ideas about how researchers/ research leaders may want to explore perspectives about the role of research communication.
This will get you thinking about:
· When is the right time to get started with your research communication?
· Why seeing yourself as a science/research communicator is just part of
the job?
· Who could your audience be?
· What is gained from deep listening and 2-way communication?
· How you may get surprised by the possibilities that engaging research participants may bring?
Access all podcasts and show notes from: https://tesselledevelopment.com/podcast
Register on our mailing list to receive Podcast updates: https://tesselledevelopment.activehosted.com/f/5
Get in touch for questions, queries or to suggest a brilliant contributor: sandrine@tesselledevelopment.com
Dr. Sandrine Soubes: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening wherever you are. You are now on the podcast Research Lives and Cultures. I am Sandrine Soubes your host. Today I have the pleasure to have with me Robin Morton who comes from Edinburgh. He works at the Center for Regenerative Medicine in the Institute for Regeneration and Repair at the University of Edinburgh. Robin works as a Science Communication Manager, and he has previous experiences working in the research environment. I've felt that his experience of working in the area of research communication was an interesting topic to share with many of our listeners. To get us started, Robin, could you tell us a little bit about your career so far. A brief overview of your path?
Dr. Robin Morton: I trained as a research scientist. I did an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, pharmacology, PhD in neuroscience. I did one post-doc became learning and memory. From there, I had a real decision to make between cutting in academia and moving into industry. I chose to jump into industry for a few years. I think I spent about four to five years working in the pharmaceutical industry. From there, I actually came back into university, but this time as a project manager. In that project management role, I dealt with a lot of different aspects of managing a human genetics project.
Anything from business development, interacting with industry, dealing with participants, running the study, really all different aspects of that. One of those things was communications. Over the years I've gradually developed my science communications skills. The job before my current job really cemented that. My current job Science Communication Manager of the Center for Regenerative Medicine, I joined the center five years ago, and that was my first full-time role as a communications manager. Just at the start with this year, I got the opportunity to jump back into project management and managing the UKRMP engineered cell environment hub. It's nice now to have that mix of both communications and project management.
Dr. Sandrine: Can I take you step back in your career and at the point when you were doing your postdoc, what was your approach to making a decision into deciding what type of postdoc to do? Then at the end of that, what's made you decide to towards industry? What were the elements that meant that you said, well, actually I'm not going to follow the academic track, I'm going to try something else?
Dr. Robin: I think the context of this is I took a year out between third and fourth year at university, and I worked for Glaxo in the pharma industry. It was an academic institute, but it was very much about research and development of new drugs. That really changed my work completely. I loved the work. It made me want to pursue a career initially in industry. At the point it came to doing a PhD I was like, "No, well, I'll persevere, go for a PhD. I think as a result of that year, I did better in my degree, I did better my PhD and then really got hooked into academia and thought, "No, actually, maybe there's a possibility I could do similar things but in an academic environment."
It was that crunch moment of the end of the first postdoc where I was going "Got some reasonable publications here, no nature papers, unfortunately, but journal of physiology things." I also to give you a bit of context I did struggle a bit with the public presentation of the research to other researchers. I didn't have that encyclopedic knowledge that some scientists seem to have where they could just draw information out of the air about this paper and that paper. I think at that point I felt, yes. I think I could do well, but I'm not quite sure that I'll really make a success of academia.
I really felt that I could make a difference and make a go at industry. At that point, it was a really hard decision. Literally the salaries at that point were no different than from working in very similar places. I jumped into industry just to develop that skill set and get that expedience. It was actually a graduate role, even though I was a postdoc, but I just wanted to really build up that understanding and experience of R&D in industry.
Dr. Sandrine: That's interesting what you're saying actually in terms of the entry point in industry, and that's often something that PhD graduates and postdocs when they are considering entering industry are not quite sure where they land. Actually, sometime you may not get to a role that is a senior role, and you have to almost take a step back. What do you think was important in the way that you portrayed your competencies at that point to be recruited? I've interviewed a lot and I've worked as a coach with a lot of postdocs and PhD students who find it very hard to articulate their competencies for this transition into industrial position.
Dr. Robin: I honestly think it was about how I communicated my research experience. How I talked about science and how I interacted with the people in the room. I think there were nine of us in the room for the interview around a table. How is it different from an academic interview, it was different probably in that they were more broadly focused in my skills and my interests and maybe less so on my knowledge of detailed papers.
Dr. Sandrine: In a way it's almost like communication was almost an important element, even at the point of transition in the way that you were able to just talk about things, to engage in the context of that interview.
Dr. Robin: I think so. Thinking back to lab group meetings and industry, it was very much a team approach. It wasn't "Look at me, here's my amazing research." It was "Look what we have and what contributes to our projects, and how is this driving the aims of the company along?" Rather than, trying to stand up and defend with perhaps more niche science. I don't know.
Dr. Sandrine: It's something that's for a lot of researchers who have not quite made up their mind yet whether they want to move into industry or not the idea actually of not just working for yourself in term of this is my research and I'm doing stuff for myself, for my career and so on. Also, you should have that when you're working in a research group, but often maybe it's not something that people feel deeply enough, but when you start working in industry, it's about the aims of the business and what needs to achieve for the business less than things that needs to be achieved for your own career progression as such.
How was it to actually transition in industry and have that shift of it's less about the results that are just for your own stuff that actually results for the company and so on?
Dr. Robin: In my case, although it was industry it was an academic, a crossover area. It was an academic institute, the Novartis Institute, at UCL in London. I think they had a slightly less focused approach here, perhaps a bit more police guy R&D than the drug development programs. I was developing a model to look at gut pain. In a sense that felt like my own project, but very much the results of that were really to help to support a drug that had obviously gone in the market but the mechanism of action wasn't all that clear. I guess the reward as a scientist was, yes, we developed this model, but equally that this is contributing to the success of the company, that the group is a whole.
Dr. Sandrine: I'd like to move a little bit to the work that you are currently doing as a research communication manager. How did you actually get started in research communication? What were your first experiences of communicating research?
Dr. Robin: Laterally in industry, I was working contract research and there we were working with industry clients. Really it was very much about communicating with those clients and understanding what they needed, and then hopefully giving them what they wanted and communicating well by conducting good preclinical studies. I think that was my first moment that I first thought, actually I'm not just a scientist who does stuff in the lab. I am capable of communicating what I do and communicating hopefully effectively. From there, I went into academia as a project manager, but there was really very much developing that skill of communicating what we were doing.
We were recruiting people to a human genetics project, and we had to be clear about what we wanted to do, even though it was quite a complex study. We had to use plain English, but still retain the truth of it not in any way dumbing down the science. That really was my introduction to science communication was through necessity through trying to communicate with potential research participants, to recruitment of the study, and being open and clear about what we wanted to do with their samples and data.
Dr. Sandrine: What did you learn about research communication in terms of really engaging people, because there is an often, I told you about that in workshops this idea of a one way where you're just providing information to the shift towards a dialogue way of research communication? What do you think that you learned yourself or what it really takes to engage?
Dr. Robin: In that role, we had social scientists on the project and I think they really made me think about that dialogue, that two-way communication. Not that I would have necessarily thought of it in that way at that time. That idea that we are not just telling these people what we're going to do with their samples and data. We should be listening to their concerns about what might happen to their samples and data and responding in the way that we designed that study and the information that we give them. Yes, there was definitely a dialogue there, and that was very much driven by the social scientist and the needs of the study itself.
The people who create divisions between different forms of communication, which sometimes vexes me. There's public and patient involvement. There's four people we call public engagement, meaning engaging with schools or immediate engagement, dealing with the press, television, whatever. Then the more defined into the spectrum, you might have that dialogic engagement where you're actually maybe engaging with the people who might benefit from the research in the line, listening to what they say about what you're doing, and then maybe actually altering the way that you design your research as a result.
People do delineate between them, but there is commonality and really ultimately, it's about, what's your audience, what's your message, communicate it clearly, and being open to listening.
Dr. Sandrine: It's a really important element the listening, but also being prepared to change your mind to listen and change your study. Have you experienced yourself context where actually the two-way dialogue was actually taking place, where there was a real engagement where actually you may have changed your mind?
Dr. Robin: The short answer is yes. I went to a project where listening definitely changed the way that project was run. I've also seen the opposite. There was an advisory group to a particular project that I won't name and their mantra was 'Nothing about us without us'. They were involved in this project for a number of years, and then the meeting to close the project it was a bit of a fanfare. There was a minister there and they basically stood up and said, "Look, you didn't listen." That's devastating. That's very difficult. Now, where I've seen that very positively is I used to work with the Director of the [unintelligible 00:13:43] breath cohort studies in Edinburgh, groups of older people who all sat the same intelligence test, age 11.
Now, they're in their 80s and 90s. Professor [unintelligible 00:13:56] who directed that study just naturally, he spoke to his participants at the end of each three-year cycle of funding and of results. The first people to hear the results of that study were the participants themselves before it was published in some cases. Certainly, before the media got to hear about it. Six years in the second reunion of research participants in that study, one of them put up their hand and said, "Why aren't you collecting our brains?" This was a study of the aging brain and the researcher was slightly taken aback. Of course, brain material would be wonderful, wouldn't it?
They felt that this was too much to ask, but actually, that research participant and many, many others went on to prove that they were willing to donate brain material after they died. I think on the third or fourth round of funding we got the ethics, they got the process together and brain donation is now part of the university studies. That's a direct example. It's a bit simpler because it's a study of aging and it's the older people who are participants. It's a bit harder to imagine if you're doing a study of a molecule or a receptor or a pathway in the brain. I think that there are things that one can think about in terms of how you design your work almost no matter what it is.
Dr. Sandrine: That's really interesting. One of the challenges obviously for researchers is that they are told that they should engage the public, do outreach, do this, that, and the other. With the research excellence framework, you need to submit some of the impacts that you've had, and engaging the public is part of that. When you are still early in your research career, it's very hard to know how to invest your time and how to be strategic in terms of the type of research communication that you ought to be doing. This balance between doing stuff just for the fun of it because you enjoy doing it and investing time in research communication activities that really may pay off. It's really difficult.
When you're working closely with people, making suggestions about the type of communication strategy they may have for the research, what's your approach to supporting people? What advice do you give them?
Dr. Robin: I'd say it really depends on the personality of the researcher. I think my advice is to start small and do what you're comfortable with. Ultimately, you need to think about your audience, always think about your audience. If you're studying leukemia who's your audience? It's patients, families of patients, it's clinicians, it's policymakers potentially. You probably don't as a young researcher want to go straight into the Scottish parliament or the UK parliament and march up to an MSP or an MP and start talking about your research.
I think the act communicating almost the matter of the audience and helps you build up that confidence in your own ability as a communicator. Also, it shows you what people value in that communication. I've got some great examples of where a PhD student has come up in projects. I've worked with them to develop it. It's been just a really nice example of dialogue. Actually, there was benefit on both sides in terms of the way, in that case, it was patients living with multiple sclerosis or people living with multiple sclerosis and the MS researchers.
Both sides benefitted in terms of your understanding of the condition, motivation, and in the cases of people suffering or living with MS to start feeling that they'd gained from the experience just by hearing a little bit more about the research that's going on. How it takes years to advance but just knowing that there are human beings working on this in the background, it gives them some hope, even if it won't improve their life in the short term, it gives them hope. I think that's it. You start small and you do what you're comfortable with. Over time you learn, hopefully, work with comms professionals as well.
Over time you'll learn what works and what you're good at and how both you and hopefully other teams can benefit from those interactions.
Dr. Sandrine: Is there a way of being strategic in deciding the type of opportunity to take? Again, that's something that I often repeat with researchers is that going from your comfort zone to actually doing something that will create more exposure because you could just be staying in your comfort zone. If you're happy doing workshops in a primary school, you could always be doing that, but in terms of the impact for your own career and again, it's depending on what you want to do next. There isn't a set path, but how can people make a decision or knowing am I just staying in my bubble of comfort, or am I really stretching myself of creating an impact in the type of research communication strategies that I'm taking?
Dr. Robin: In terms of being strategic it's just that and you'll see this in grant applications, although things have changed recently. How are you going to reach your audience? Who's going to benefit from this research, how are you going to reach that audience? What are you going to do to reach that audience? These are very good questions. If you answer those questions truthfully and honestly, and you have a bit of skill in those areas, then you're onto a good start. In terms of stretching yourself, yes, absolutely stretch yourself but listen to feedback.
Not everyone should speak to the media, for example, because some people just have a real knack for it, some people will learn it, and some people just will never, ever be comfortable doing that kind of communication. You should listen to that, either feedback or that voice inside your head that's telling you. Unfortunately, with things like that, where you are out with your comfort zone, the overwhelming noise is usually, "No, I can't do this" but actually, the more you try it, the more you practice it, if you grab media training, I would always engage early career researchers to go and do media training and experience what it's like to be interviewed in the radio, experience what it's like to be interviewed on television or by a journalist.
Yes, it's uncomfortable, but you can discover a lot about your abilities, and also improve on how you react to that kind of situation.
Dr. Sandrine: In examples of research communication activity that you've either been involved in or observed, do you have some examples of things that you've seen been very impactful? You mentioned a PhD student working on multiple sclerosis, do you have the example where it really impacts their career, or the next step that they've taken, or the exposure that they gained?
Dr. Robin: That's a difficult one because sometimes impact and choose your definition of impact there but sometimes impact can take years. My mantra is that just because something doesn't have an impact within the lifetime of a grant, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Yes, you want things that will have more of a chance of achieving some impact of your research. In terms of things that I've seen, and seen done well, I worked with a young researcher on that aging project. An opportunity came up to do something called the Cavalier Dangerous Ideas. I let him know about it because I knew at heart, he was a performer.
Long story short, over three years at the Edinburgh Festival, he stood up doing a spoken word show about the aging brain and he did extremely well. The work was conveyed in an engaging way. It was entertaining. It was informative and it was definitely reaching audiences that wouldn't otherwise have engaged in science. No, not everyone needs to be a performer. You can do stand-up comedy about your research if you really want to but it doesn't have to be a performance. That same researcher went on to set up something called Research the Headlines, which was combating the misinformation with the social media world.
Working with school pupils to develop their analytical skills in terms of interpreting a newspaper report about some science. They would look at a research paper, they would look at the headlines that resulted from that research paper, and then they would discuss where things had gone awry, or if they'd gone awry. Those are two almost extreme examples of different ways of approaching research communication. That researcher has won prizes for his communication work. He's now an Assistant Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is doing well in his research career.
Dr. Sandrine: It's an example where actually future citizens if you're working with young people actually perceive science and are able to be critical of what they see in the media. It's education to prepare people to be more analytical in the way they're perceiving information. It ought to be done systematically in school, but it's clearly not.
Dr. Robin: Yes, and that won't work for every young person. We've done that with other initiatives. We're really encouraging people to question what they see on social media or in newspapers. The specific example of the PhD student who developed an art workshop where both people living with MS and scientists studying MS worked on artwork together. This was to break down that potentially perceived power relationship between the person living with the condition and the scientist. They just naturally as they were producing these artworks talked, and they talked about the condition and talked about other things.
The two things that stuck out from that project one was the overwhelmingly positive response from the researchers who all felt that they'd gained more understanding about the condition, and the lives of the people who live with that condition. Also, came away motivated, reenergized to continue, and drive towards research that will benefit those people. The second thing that came out of it was one of those research participants that said to me, "I came along expecting to be giving, and not really getting anything back but I've come away feeling that I've benefited just from the interactions, just from meeting the scientists, just from understanding a little bit more about research and how it happens, and the people involved in that research, that they're human beings, and they don't all wear lab coats all the time. They're very different individuals."
There was definite dialogue there. There was definite benefit both sides. It was a really nice project.
Dr. Sandrine: I like the idea of thinking about, as a research scientist, it can be so hard to get to be progressing in your project when you see some time a project, just not shifting at all, and finding a way of feeling re-energized, which is the term that you use. Using the exposure to patients or to the real context of the problem you're trying to solve is trying to address. Finding a way to be reenergized to work really hard on whatever your problem is that you have, through the reality of what this work is about, I think is a really nice way of thinking about research communication.
Yes, they are projects where this endpoint end user and so on is much further down but in a way, it's anchoring whatever research project, to the reality of what this is about is really, really important. It can feel like people will say, "Well, I'll just do basic research," but it's never really about just basic research. It's always anchored in a problem you're trying to address that affects someone in some ways. I think that a lot of researchers forget that and are drowned in just the technicalities of the research itself.
Dr. Robin: I hear a lot of people saying, "Well, I don't have anything to say, we're still so early on in this research process, well I do want benefit," but I think giving those individuals a realistic expectation of what research can achieve in the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, is a good thing. That's empowering those people, it's giving them the information, it's giving them that the way to think about their condition, and research that's done on it, and that's empowering for them.
Dr. Sandrine: In your role as a communication manager, you worked with many senior research leaders, how do you see the impact of being able to communicate well your research? You must be advising senior academics and so on, on how they should go about doing their research communication. What is your approach to working with them because they may come to you when they're developing a project, say, "Oh, I need to do that thing." The impact thing or whatever the grant is asking, and some people engage really, really well. It's not everybody is necessarily interested.
How do you approach in a way, almost like reshaping the way maybe people think about research communication so that they come at it not from a point of that's a requirement but from a perspective of how can this be useful, or how can I do a good contribution?
Dr. Robin: I think there's actually two questions there.
Dr. Sandrine: There are many questions.
Dr. Robin: I think the first question is senior research leaders and their approach to communicating in science. There are some very, very senior people who are incredibly gifted in communicating their science to many different audiences. Then there are very, very senior and accomplished scientists, who are not very good at communicating at that level. Making no judgments, there are some really successful scientists I can think of who've really reached the top of their game in academia, and beyond, I think, because they can pitch an idea very succinctly, very clearly.
I hesitate to say simply because people think of simplicity as taking away from the science. No, I mean, with clarity. No, that could be to a funding agency. It could be to senior colleagues. It could be to potential research donor, charity, and charities fall over themselves to have a really good communicator who's also a great scientist, and to be able to talk to their donors and tell them what's possible. Actually, that could be any stage in your career. You could be applying for a postdoc with a charity or some charitable funding, if you can communicate your ideas really, really clearly that charity have potentially much more money.
There'll be more funding to go around. I don't think it's just the really senior leadership. In terms of whether a research engagement is both sticking or whether it's really substantively contributing a project. The research funding councils, obviously they start to implement the impact statements and the impact plans, and the driver for that was obviously to get researchers to think more seriously about engagement. In the end both at university level and at funding agency level I think that slightly fell short because ultimately if you need to cut something from your research then you might not cut the really solid bit of science in the middle.
You might cut that engagement side. Also, ultimately these funding bodies are using other scientists to assess research. If they don't value that engagement aspect then it's not going to get through no matter what, but the regulation says- An example of Edinburgh, where this has been embedded in or attempting to embed this in the research culture. There's a new PhD student in Edinburgh where there's a substantive public engagement element to it. It's focused on research impact. It's not just engagement for engagement's sake.
Those PhD students are getting training in communication and being encouraged to think about the beneficiaries of their research and engaging and how engaging could benefit their research. In addition to that it's now in the promotional criteria and the annual review criteria for academic posts. Again, that's dependent on the individuals who administer that process who are academics, who may or may not necessarily buy into the idea that engagement is important.
Dr. Sandrine: In your own role as a research communication specialist, if you're working with academics who are not necessarily very positive but know that they have to do that thing, what is your own approach to get them to think about it in a different way so that they can have a sense of what actually can come as a positive thing out of doing the research communication?
Dr. Robin: That's an interesting question. How do you move to beat the skeptics? I think there's two approaches. One is you don't and you either provide that support as a professional communicator to help them translate the research. The other is that you look for ways in which that researcher would feel comfortable and see the benefit from engaging. Now that could be as simple as thinking of, well, who are your beneficiaries? How will they benefit from this research and therefore one; how you're going to engage with them, and two; how will you then translate that engagement into impact.
That's fine. That ultimately is my response when people come to me and say, "Can you send me that paragraph that I need to include in this section?" Which is that so many people say that. Of course, my next question is, well, what's the project about because they wouldn't even necessarily tell me that. Once I knew a little bit about what the project projects about, I can start to think of, well, who's the beneficiaries. Is it patients with this condition or is it clinicians, or is it actually, ultimately this research is potentially in the short-term only benefit the research community by pushing them forward, providing new tips and techniques for others to use, but then in the future that could have benefit in these following ways?
I guess that's my approach is to try and take it back to first principles and think, well, what can be achieved and how? Fundamentally your researcher have a lot of pressures and they may be disinclined for a number of reasons. One is lack of confidence and that they'll never particularly be a great communicator. Another is that they have other pressures in terms of teaching workloads, in terms of applying for funding, and managing a lab, managing students, managing postdocs, and other responsibilities in academia. There's lots of different reasons why somebody might not want to do this work. It's not just that they don't know or don't care.
Dr. Sandrine: What would be a quick win for let's say a new PI who is trying to build their research group, is starting to lecture, is trying to get their first grants to actually find a way of doing research communication in a way that is-- I will not maybe say easy is not the right word, but in a way that it's manageable and impactful but at the same time, doesn't take too much time.
Dr. Robin: Sure. Well, from a standing start, if you work with blood, speak to the charities that deal with blood conditions, develop those contacts. Sometimes it can lead to funding. Sometimes it can just lead to conversations and further contacts. Start small and try things out I think is the way to look at it. If you do one thing in a year, see how that goes or I guess in terms of a practical thing to do come and speak to somebody like me. Go and speak to a science communicator, because it's always of course, much harder to start something from scratch if you can buy into something that's existing.
For example, we have a skills work experience program that we run every year with an hour and a half's two hours work, a researcher can get to speak to a group of very, very motivated 17-year-olds who are thinking about studying science. That's something small that can be achieved. The other thing is if you're that way inside a lot of people use social media first and foremost usually to communicate with other scientists, but it doesn't need to exclusively be that. Again, you can contribute by writing a blog to something that has got a wider audience or write an article, or do a podcast, so that you're not burdened with having to do all the work.
I think the other thing is to get trained. I've already mentioned media training, go and do a media training course. It's probably half a day but it will stand you in good stead and perhaps give you that confidence. When you get your good results, I used to work a lot with AGK and their Head of Knowledge Exchange said to me, "Never let the first time you speak to your audience be when you've got your big result. You got to have spoken to them five years before, three years before two years before."
Dr. Sandrine: One of the questions that I had for you is what makes research communication fail?
Dr. Robin: Lack of focus makes research communication fail, not really thinking about who your audience actually is. If you try and communicate with too many different audiences at once you will fail because it's not pitched at the right level for one or other of those audiences. I guess going back to actually, what is your message? Your message is not your research result. Your message is why is that relevant to those people?
Dr. Sandrine: I used to organize a lot of media training and one of the fears when people were thinking about talking to journalists, they were already seeing the crazy headlines that may come out of a really bad interview and so on. For some people, it created limiting beliefs of wanting to engage with the media. In your experience, what's the worst that can happen?
Dr. Robin: For me actually the worst that can happen is that you go to a lot of effort and because you haven't thought about your audience and your message, you try to communicate and people go away confused. I always try to think, no matter what is being done as long as you're clear about what relatively straightforward message is core to this activity, that's what you have to get across to that group or those individuals. How'd you go over that is focusing in on who are your audiences, what your message is. Fundamentally, the basic thing you can do is think, well, how is this piece of research relevant to this individual or to society because that individual might not be affected directly by it, but they might see why this research could benefit societies.
The big thing about GM was the engagement upfront, and had there been more engagement upfront society as a whole would potentially have been more prepared. I'm sure there would have been opposition, but society as a whole would have potentially been more prepared to potentially less information if they'd been more proactive engagement.
Dr. Sandrine: It's funny you're referring to that because I used to run a module on public engagement for PhD students many, many years ago. I was always starting the module talking about how badly the scientific community has dealt with engaging about GM. In a way, it was almost like the starting point of getting us to actually understand why it matters so much to actually engage with people early on, and not when you've done all this amazing science, but then people say, "Well, actually we don't want that." The upstream engagement how important it is and true openness in dialogue instead of just, "We're going to tell you what we want you to know."
Just a one-way thing and thinking about it now in the way people perceive issues to do with the COVID vaccines, thinking about the way the media, for example, portrayed the AstraZeneca vaccine in countries like my own country in France, and the way people are now perceiving it and refusing the vaccine. The role of communication in that context and the massive impact that it has. Then when people are set in their views, they're not prepared to budge. Early engagements and early discussions really, really matters a great deal in the long-term because you may have the best vaccine in the world but if people have felt that they've not been listened or that things have been explained early on and openly enough with enough transparency, then people say, "Well, they're hiding something" and then conversation is not possible anymore.
Dr. Robin: You mentioned the media what's the worst that can happen? Again, when I was working with that aging group, somebody was looking at epigenetics in older age. The Daily Spice headline was 'Secret to Longer Life Found.' Obviously, that is nonsense. That's nothing to do with research. I was really quite nervous about what the senior scientist would think about that and actually, he was okay. Been through enough media to know that people read the headline, they don't necessarily immediately believe it. Actually, the article itself was pretty good. Often this whole headline thing can put people off engaging with the media.
You have to think that well from patient experience a lot of people if they got on to actually read the article, got to hear about that science quite detailed science.
Dr. Sandrine: I think it's funny because always knowing that the person who's written the headline is not the person who's written the article is a really important one and they serve very different purposes. To finish off our discussion, Robin, I'll be interested to ask you, what would you tell your younger self about communicating your research and about your professional transition in the research environment?
Dr. Robin: This is easy for me because somebody else told me something when I was a first-year PhD student and it's absolutely stayed with me throughout my career and is as relevant as a communications manager as it was as a PhD student and a researcher. I was very lucky in my PhD project. Quite quickly we had some good results because my supervisor had some great ideas about what to pursue. I wrote the results up. I spent hours and hours on the figures and we went to practice the presentation that I was going to give to the physiological society. It was 5 or 10 minutes long, I can't remember which, and I practiced and practiced.
I gave the talk in front of my supervisor. He nodded and he said, "Okay, just you come and sit here" and he went into the front and he presented what I'd just presented. Of course, it was great. It was fantastic. I was sitting there feeling a bit crestfallen but that was the one bit of advice that he gave me which was "Robin, tell a story, tell a story about your research. Yes, pick your fingers up one to eight or whatever it was and you can explain what they show, but what you need to be doing is tell a story."
Then I gave the talk again, but telling it as a story and that's every talk I've ever given since and any form of communication that I put together it's about, what's the story behind this because people intuitively understand the story. If you just throw information at them, it's very difficult for the brain to take in. I think I heard you talk about this on the course.
Dr. Sandrine: Absolutely. That's always my encouragement.
Dr. Robin: Especially you're in Scotland there's a tradition as a care lead which is its music, its stories, its songs, and storytelling, that tradition of storytelling of Scotland is the way information was passed on from generation to generation. That's intuitively how as humans we interpret information. So, yes just tell a story.
Dr. Sandrine: Any other advice that you will give a researcher, your top tips for good communication as a researcher? Storytelling will be one. What else would you tell people?
Dr. Robin: I think I've said it a few times, but think about your audience, who is your audience? What's important to them? Why is this research important to them and is that a context that they're familiar with that you can capitalize on? Actually, sometimes the story is, do you know what this is really, it's actually really hard to describe because it's so complex? Actually, that's telling that person something. I'm telling you that I'm having trouble explaining this because it really takes me a while to get my head round it. You've taken that fear away from that individual that they don't understand it because they're stupid.
Dr. Sandrine: No, I really like that because also it's about removing the hierarchy that people feel. I am the layperson and here is the scientist, the researcher who knows it all and actually saying, "Well, we're just human beings. We know different things and we understand the world through different lens." If you're a researcher struggling to share the complexities of your project, I like this way of saying, "Well, actually it's really hard."
Dr. Robin: Also, fundamentally researchers think that opinion and emotion shouldn't come into their research but actually it's very powerful for me as a communicator communicating research, if a researcher says, "Oh, this is incredible. I never thought this would happen. I never thought this would be the result." That's captivating, that captures my attention when somebody says that, and you can start to see that they're passionate about what they're talking about. Not being afraid to share the human emotion part of it is not a bad thing.
Dr. Sandrine: I love that. Thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Dr. Robin: Thank you.
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Dr. Sandrine: I hope you've enjoyed the discussion I had with my guest. I'm very grateful that you've been listening to us. I hope that you will join in the future podcast. I wish you a very good day and if you want to contribute to the podcast, I'm very interested to hear from you, as I'm always happy to invite some new interviewees on this podcast. If you've got an interesting story about life and research and about the research environment, get in touch with me at sandrine@tesselledevelepment.com.
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