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Dag Hessen: Communicating Science Through Children’s Literature

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Sam Perrin 2 comments

Image Credit: Akademikerne, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped

The past couple of years has seen younger generations become increasingly active with regards to environmental change. Recent protests worldwide, spearheaded by people like Greta Thunberg, have been incredibly encouraging to watch. So it’s important that scientists continue to improve our ability to communicate science to children.

On that note, I spoke to Dag Hessen, Norwegian ecologist and writer, who has published several science books, also successful children’s books. We spoke about the importance of explaining ecological concepts to children, the process of writing a book, and dealing with a different form of writing.

The Forefront

Shannon McCauley: The Role of Gender in Authorship Bias

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Adam Hasik Leave a comment

Image Credit: Breakingpic, Pexels licence, Image Cropped

Who gets the credit in scientific articles is a pressing question (covered in a previous opinion piece), and deciding how to award authorship is especially relevant given the impact that papers in high-impact journals can have on the trajectory of a scientist early in their career.

With this in mind, I spoke with Dr. Shannon McCauley of the University of Toronto-Mississauga during her November visit to the University of Arkansas (more about Shannon can be found in our previous interview). In addition to giving a talk on some of her research, Shannon also led a workshop on authorship in science. I sat down with her afterwards to talk more about the subject.

The Forefront

Madhur Anand: Finding Poetry in Global Change Ecology

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Sam Perrin 2 comments

Professor Madhur Anand is a global change ecologist and a poet. So how do the two combine? (Image Credit: Karen Whylie)

Image Credit: Karen Whylie, University of Guelph, CC BY 2.0

When I interview ecologists, there are two themes I always end up gravitating towards; how the earth is changing and how to improve scientific communication with the general public. So when my colleague Stephanie Januchowski-Hartley mentioned she’d recently spoken to a global change ecologist who also happened to be a poet, I jumped at the opportunity.

Professor Madhur Anand is the co-author of Climate Change Biology and the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, a collection of poems which bridge the gap between poetry and science. Along her way to picking up two Canada Research Chairs and the ICCC Female Professional of the Year award, she has worked with theoretical physicists, poets and mathematicians. I spoke to Madhur about interdisciplinarity, using poetry to connect with the general public, and the future of the planet.

The Forefront

Andrew Hendry: The Changing Views and Speeds of Evolution

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Sam Perrin One comment

The word evolution generally conjures images of millenia-long timescales. Maybe the 15 million years it took for whales to evolve, or the 2.5 million years it took to get from Australopithecus to modern humans. But over the last few decades, scientists have begun to realise that some forms of evolution can take place over much shorter timescales. Leading this field has been Professor Andrew Hendry, author of Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics, a “masterful, comprehensive synthesis treating most of today’s hot topics in ecology and evolution”.

The Forefront