Archive for October, 2009

Science Writers 2009 Conference

I recently attended the Science Writers 2009 conference in Austin, Texas, hosted by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW). Since some of you may not know me, here’s a little bit about where I’m coming from — although I am a PhD graduate student in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I am also becoming a science writer – I have a blog on stem cells called All Things Stem Cell, did a few posts for Nature’s stem cell blog, “The Niche,” and recently started a column with the Santa Barbara Independent called “Biology Bytes.” With aspirations in mind, I traveled to Austin last weekend (Oct. 17th and 18th) for my first science writers’ convention. Below is coverage on the Saturday workshops and the Sunday morning CASW New Horizons in Science sessions. Yes, the coverage is rather detailed – I tried to give plenty of information for those of you who wanted to attend but could not. I’ve tried to highlight key terms to ease scanning down the story. I also created an amateur photo gallery of my trip. If you want to see more coverage, check NASW’s coverage website or the CASW website.

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My first first-author paper!

Just wanted to share that my first first-author paper is now online! In the journal Stem Cells and Development, here’s my paper on “Roles of Integrins in Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Growth on Matrigel and Vitronectin.”

Forum on Science Ethics and Policy getting a wider audience

I don’t remember how much I’ve told people about this before, but since moving to Seattle I’ve been involved with a group called the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy. We’re a group of graduate students and post-docs at the University of Washington that is focused on making connections between scientists and the wider public dealing with a variety of issues. We’ve dealt with a pretty wide range of subjects, a few examples range from stem cells, energy policy, net neutrality and drug marketing.

The reason I’m posting now is that we recently reworked our website to make some features that could appeal to people beyond our immediate community, and I figured some of the people around here might find it worth looking at. The most obvious addition was changing the main page to a leadership blog for us to post about things related to FOSEP’s mission.

We had also collected various materials FOSEP members wrote up that was intended to be a resource for people learning about issues, though the static pages tended to become left incomplete or outdated after the creator graduated and nobody took over. To try and get around this we converted those into a wiki format that will be viewable to the public though editable by all FOSEP members. If people have suggestions for changes to make there and don’t have access they could contact me about it.