Patricia Fernández de Lis
Patricia Fernandez de Lis has been working for over 15 years as a journalist, covering the economy, science, and technology. She was on the editorial staff of El País for more than 10 years, on subjects related to the new technologies and Internet. During that time she interviewed personalities such as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Eric Schmidt (Google) and had several cover articles in El Pais Semanal.
In 2007 she joined the founding team of Público newspaper as chief editor of the science section which, with an editorial staff of 7 emitting 3 to 4 pages every day, was one of the largest in the European press. Público received the Special Prisma Prize 2010 from the jury of the Casa de las Ciencias of A Coruña, the most prestigious award for science popularization in Spain.
Since June 3rd 2012 she has been the director of the news website MATERIA (http://esmateria.com), which aims to become the reference site in Spanish for information about science, technology, health, and the environment. With 1.5 million users in only one year, and hundreds of thousands of followers on the social networks, MATERIA is one of the webs of news about science in Spanish which is growing most rapidly.
In September 2014 MATERIA became associated with El País, and Patricia was appointed editor in chief of Science and Technology of that newspaper.
She is a Lecturer on the Master’s degree in Communication of Science, Technology and the Environment at the University Carlos III Madrid. She has given lectures on science, journalism, and outreach throughout Spain, and in other countries, such as the US, Mexico and Estonia.
In 2002 she received the German Marshall scholarship for young European leaders, and in 2011 won the Mario Bohoslavsky Prize for her contribution to the fight against pseudoscience. In 2012 she was chosen among the 20 Spaniards in the business world for a meeting with the president of Ford. In December 2012 was awarded a scholarship by the Knight Foundation.
She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Association for the Communication of Science (AECC) and is an Advising Counsellor for ONGAWA.
INVITED TALK: The challenge of presenting science in a daily newspaper
MATERIA will celebrate its first anniversary in October as the new science section of El País. News, features, videos, computer graphics, photo galeries. This is how we build the science pages of the biggest daily newspaper in the world in Spanish. How do we journalists work, and what do we ask of the scientists? Communication between the two communities is basic if we want to improve the popularization of science, but it is also important to distinguish between the types of work carried out by the two professions.
