Tomorrow the Forum “100xCIENCIA” will be inaugurated in La Palma
The 20 Severo Ochoa research centres of excellence will meet with popularizers of science at the meeting, in which there will be over 200 participants
The science journalist Kenneth Chang of the New York Times will give the inaugural address
Kenneth Chang, of the New York Times, a journalist specializing in science, will give the inaugural lecture to the “100XCIENCIA” (“Communicating Frontier Science”), with the title “Why does anyone care about dinosaurs, Pluto and the Higgs boson anyway?”. The venue for this meeting will be the Circo de Marte Theatre in Santa Cruz de La Palma. The meeting will be inaugurated tomorrow, Wednesday 7th October at 09.00, by the President of the Cabildo of La Palma, Anselmo Pestana, the mayor of Santa Cruz de La Palma, Sergio Matos, and the director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and chairman of the organizing committee of the forum, Rafael Rebolo.
“100XCIENCIA” is a forum which brings together more than 200 people to La Palma, from Wednesday 7th October until Friday 9th, with the aim of reflecting about the present state of science, and about the popularization of research. It is organized by the 20 Spanish research centres which have been given the Severo Ochoa Award for excellence, and this will be the first time that they all meet together to interchange views and opinions.
The forum will centre on the theme of how the communication and popularization of science take their places in the “ecosystem” of innovation and research. For this purpose the meeting will take the form of lectures and panel sessions of scientists representing the 20 Severo Ochoa Centres, and of journalists specializing in this type of information. Journalists of this type include Kenneth Chang, and the Editor in Chief of El País/Materia, Patricia Fernández de Lis, who tomorrow, Wednesday, will give the lecture “The challenge of doing science in a newspaper”. The full programme can be found on the website. Other communicators participating in the forum are the Emeritus President of the European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations Hanns J. Neubert, and the coordinator and chief editor of the Service of Information and Science News (SINC), Pampa García Molina.
The forum will also provide training, and for this the IAC and the foundation Santander Universidades of the Bank of Santander have invited 25 young science journalists or students of journalism in their final years, from a number of countries, to attend the meeting. This group, as well as participating in the full programme of “100XCIENCIA” will carry out a networking activity with an observation of the sun and a workshop/debate about sources for science journalism, with an analysis of news about science.
In “100XCIENCIA” there will be debates within four panel sessions, with the participation of well-known communicators and science journalists together with scientists from the Severo Ochoa centres and politicians related to science. “Science and the challenges of the XXI Century”, “Science Policy”, “The impact of outreach on Society” and “Science and the media” will be the four topics chosen for debate at the panel sessions.
In the framework of this meeting there will also be a series of activities for the general public. Among these are the lectures on “Diabetes” by Joan Guinovart, of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and on “Taking Decisions” by Luis Martínez Otero of the Institute for Neurosciences (IN) , which will take place on Wednesday 7th October at the end of the professional programme in the Circo de Marte Theatre, in Santa Cruz de La Palma from 19.00 to 20.30. In addition researchers from a number of the Severo Ochoa centres will give talks to schoolchildren in Santa Cruz and in Los Llanos, on 9th October.
“100xCIENCIA” is organized by the 20 Severo Ochoa Centres of Excellence currently approved by the Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (MINECO) with the patronage of the Cabildo Insular of La Palma and the Bank of Santander, and with the collaboration of the City Council of Santa Cruz de La Palma and of Telefónica. This is the first coordinated effort in the field of communication by these research centres, and the aim is to create a collaborative community in order to optimize their work in communication and outreach.
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