Frank Burnet

Watching the Egyptian revolution unfold on TV and suddenly realising that Essam Sharaf an extraordinarily warm and intelligent man who I spent time with in both London and Alexandria in December had become Prime Minister of Egypt by popular acclaim

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Tags: communication, Handbooks, research, science

The Great Pyramid of Giza

It doesn’t matter how often you have seen pictures. Standing in its shadow you are one of the Pharaoh’s subjects

Egyptian Driving

Makes the Italians look like road safety fetishists. There are no discernible rules of the road and undertaking and overtaking are equally attractive options. However fast you are travelling

Dad’s 90^th

Setting  the record for the number of inebriated super seniors you could serve champagne, salmon and trifle to in what an estate agent would have described as, a surprisingly roomy dining room.

Tripoli Airport

An unscheduled ash cloud generated stop off during a four day journey back from Saudi to Canterbury. The passenger lounge was an exact replica of a 1950’s British Railways canteen and someone nicked my luggage.

The Swiss getting quite excited

I happened to be in Bern the evening that Switzerland beat Spain in the World Cup

Sci-Art in New York

An amazing conference combined with chance to take the anal temperature of the western world’s economy. Was there just a teensy bit less conviction in those “Have a Nice Days”? Well maybe, but it’s hard to measure something that already scored 9 on the Rictus Positive Attitude Scale.

Night in Hackney

Narrating this New York Radio Festival Gold Award winning podcast produced by  my eldest Francesca. Night in Hackney

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Its an obvious gap in the audience profile, right up there with pensioners who cant find a child to take them to a science centre and those elusive young adults. My chance came when word spread that I was doing science shows for kids in the local Scuola Elementaria. It reached a lady who was looking for something different to give her niece for her Birthday. She decided it should be me. No, I didn’t have to jump out of a cake but i did feel a little like something the cat brought in. Maybe its not going to be a major thread in my continuing work related active engagement portfolio but it may be an alternative to applying to grant schemes that have gone down the rabbit hole.

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A truly extraordinary Conference, in fact it was often more like a Festival. The incredible Physics and Extreme Action by STREB. Odd tOdd the Science Animator, Arthur Giron on his “Drama’s found in the lives of scientists”, Samuel Zygmuntowicz of the Strad 3D project, one of the worlds greatest violin makers. Roald Hoffman Nobel prize winning chemist turned Science Cafe organiser. Maybe it could have been somewhere else but NY, but most of them had only traveled a block or two to attend. A truly mind blowing concentration of creativity.

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The title of my talk is: What’s not a Science Festival? A tentative taxonomy of a rapidly evolving genus. Content of three slides from the presentation below.

Continua for variables

University led or owned

•Key messages
Celebration–|——-Examination
•Audience targeted
Children/Families..|……Adults
•Nature of venues
Public…….|..Scientific
• Venue map
Clustered …..|……Diffuse
•Topics featured
Old Science….|….New Science
•Responsibility for programming
Scientists..|……….Non-scientists

Municipally led or owned

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Over the last ten years I have developed  Masterclasses and a short concise handbook that is designed  to give scientists, technologists and engineers the skills they will need to communicate their work to the public. The combination has been very well received around the world and establishing my own Consultancy has been the trigger for my marketing it proactively for the first time. To discover more go to Communication Masterclasses and Why and how to communicate your research 

I have also provided numerous people with advice on how to establish and maintain a career as an effective science communicator. I also deliver workshops and supporting materials with that focus which I am also making more widely available through this site go to Communication Masterclasses and Taking Science to People 

I hope you find these materials useful and do not hesitate to contact me if you want further information at Frank.Burnet@gmail.com

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