Our Ambassadors

Since October last year, the NCCPE has been encouraging people to apply to become Public Engagement Ambassadors. This scheme helps support individuals to act as public engagement champions by providing opportunities to develop their skills and experience.

Ambassadors can also apply for funding to attend conferences and events as long as they share some of what they have learnt. Three ambassadors were funded to attend Communicate 2009 – made possible through funding from the World Wildlife Fund. You can find out more about these ambassadors below.

Don't forget, please get in touch if you have an interest in either learning more about the scheme or applying to become an Ambassador. We are hoping to develop events and resources to support ambassadors, as well as provide funding to attend events and conferences

The Ambassadors

These are the profiles of some of our ambassadors.

Penny Fletcher

Penny is a PhD student at Rothamsted Research in the Plant and Invertebrate Ecology Department. Her project focuses on the pollination of wild plants in cereal fields.

Michael Pocock

Michael is a NERC Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol working on how and why we should conserve biodiversity. He has been at the University of Bristol since 2003. Before that, he worked at the Universities of Leeds and York.

Chris Thorogood

Chris has a long-standing passion for natural history, and studied Botany at the University of Bristol. Based on his undergraduate dissertation, he was awarded a competitive University Research Scholarship (five are awarded in the Faculty of Science per year), which enabled him to pursue his own research. During his PhD, he devised a module on plant biology, comprising eight 80-minute lectures, and led a laboratory session for an evening class.

News

The Ambassadors' first appointment was to attend the Communicate Conference 2009, the annual conference for environmental communicators from across the UK and Europe. Here are some of Michael's thoughts on the event:

"Communicate 2009 affirmed to me that public engagement by scientists is about treating people as multi-faceted individuals. Once we do this we can then creatively engage with people to communicate important and often complex scientific ideas and imperatives. That engagement could be face-to-face
(we heard examples of story-telling, music and puppetry), it could be through traditional media such as newspapers and television (if they survive in the changing media landscape), or it could be through new technologies such as blogging and twittering (or whatever technology comes next)."

"Communicate 2009 reminded me of the bigger context of my research - that it really could and should be world-changing. For those researching on environmental issues, public
engagement should not therefore simply be an add-on to cutting-edge research, but ensuring that people are engaged with environmental issues is an imperative. Of course, as scientists, we need to balance the value of public engagement with the other essentials of publishing papers and winning funding. Fortunately, there is a changing culture in universities towards valuing engagement. This has been supported by the work of organisations such as NCCPE and the inclusion of public engagement as an assessment of 'impact' in the forthcoming Research Exercise Framework."

You can read more of Michael's thoughts on the Conference at his research website.