Developing a new generation of scientist communicators through effective public outreach

Do you remember what first sparked your interest in science? Was it a school experience, a particular teacher, a lesson, a color, or even a smell? Perhaps, like the New Zealand Nobel laureate Alan MacDiarmid, it was simply a book, The Boy Chemist, read as a youngster 1 . Whatever the event, it kindled a passion and led to a life-long interest and a career. Therefore, it is very worrying to see that around the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), children are becoming increasingly disengaged from science, with many losing their interest and confidence at an early age 2 . Indeed Anderhad et al. 3 suggest that an interest in science may never actually be constituted during a pupil’s primary school years. One answer to this disengagement would appear to lie in the evolving and diverse field of science communication. But what is science communication? In addition to the wide plethora of electronic and social media-based content, publicly funded bodies such as museums and universities (Beacons for public engagement; NCCPE. https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/ ) commonly run programs offering an enormous range of activities to increase engagement with science and make it cool to be a nerd 4 . This diversity gives rise to a fundamental issue for someone setting up a new program; where to find a model that can be used as a starting point?