Pub Science: Our experience organising Pint of Science 2023
On 22nd-24th May this year, the Pint of Science 2023 science communication festival took place across the world. In this post, Tom & Ella share their experience of being on the organising committee for some of UCL’s Pint of Science events.
Pint of Science is a not-for-profit organisation that brings researchers and members of the public together in pubs across the UK, and now around the world. For three days each year, nearly 500 cities worldwide host events in six different themes - Atoms to Galaxies, Beautiful Mind, Our Body, Our Society, Planet Earth and Tech Me Out. This year the festival saw its 10th anniversary! 10 years of accessible science communication brought to people’s locals - pretty impressive.
At the heart of organising all these events is a grassroots community of over 2,000 scientists in the UK alone. And this year, that number included us! As mental health researchers, we were thrilled to be chosen to help organise UCL’s Beautiful Mind events. The Beautiful Mind theme focuses on topics around psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry, so this felt like the perfect theme for us to contribute to.
The Beautiful Mind organising team posing with Pint of Science co-founder Dr. Praveen Paul
Bringing researchers to a pub to talk about their work. Sounds simple, right? Wrong! In fact, we started preparation work for this year’s Pint of Science way back in December, when we met to draw up the first plans for our three nights. Our team consisted of other PhD students and postdocs from UCL, primarily working in mental health, neuroscience and neurology. As mental health science PhD students, we wanted to make sure mental health topics would be represented in the talks, while our teammates focused on covering neurology and neuroscience related topics. Pint of Science can give a platform to academics at very different stages of their career to talk about their research, and we tried to make sure to recruit speakers from different stages of their academic careers. .
Over the couple of months leading up to the events, we planned for the themes and names for each night, recruited speakers, liaised with the venue (The George IV in Chiswick), promoted the events on Twitter, filled out some necessary paperwork and came up with fun activities for the audience to get involved with in between the talks. Come the end of May, we felt ready and prepared to kick off the series of events!
Ahead of the first evening, we were very pleased to hear that the event was sold out with over 100 tickets sold! The venue was beautifully laid out with chandeliers and lights and lots of tables nestled into groups. We felt nervous but excited to finally host our first Pint of Science event. Our first night was called “What’s On Your Mind?” and focused on mindfulness research. We had been in touch with Dr. Natalie Marchant from UCL’s Division of Psychiatry who gathered a whole team to come and present on the night, including postdoctoral researcher Dr. Tim Whitfield and licensed mindfulness teacher Andrew Waterhouse. Natalie started off by sharing how different types of thoughts have been associated with brain health in line with her research on dementia and old age mental health. Tim then went on to talk about mindfulness literature as mindfulness is a specific style of thinking as well as how mindfulness might impact thinking and brain health. Finally, Andrew led us through a mindfulness demonstration with two exercises: a grounding exercise and a compassion exercise. We loved to see that the audience really got involved with these exercises. Meditating with a hundred strangers at a pub was quite a surreal experience, but (perhaps surprisingly) very successful and thought-provoking!
Natalie Marchant talking about her research on mindfulness and its uses for mental health
For each night, we had also come up with fun activities to entertain the audience between the talks. Pint of Science’s central organisers organised training sessions on how to host a quick pub quiz on the KwizzBit platform, with which Pint of Science was collaborating. Each day of the festival, KwizzBit released a different quiz comprising fun trivia questions around different scientific themes. We presented the questions and answer options and the audience could answer on their own mobile devices. In addition to getting points for each correct answer, you also got more points the faster you answered, and the competition was always fierce to be the first to answer and receive the Haribo mini-prize! The winner of the whole round was awarded the official Pint of Science pint glass. We could also see the UK wide leaderboards which showed that we had some seriously smart (and quick) cookies, as on two nights an audience member finished in the national top 10.
Ella hosting night 1 (What's On Your Mind?)
Our second night was dedicated to different novel therapies in neurological disorders and was entitled “Gene-ius solutions”. The first talk was led by Dr. Yichen Qiu, a Research Fellow in the Institute of Neurology, who taught us all about gene therapies for epilepsy. During the break we presented a series of images of brains and asked our audience to guess which animal each brain belonged to - some of these were straightforward, but some really left us puzzled! After that, Dr. Christopher Belder from the Dementia Research Centre gave a hugely interesting talk about new approaches to treating Alzheimer’s disease. Across all of the nights, we were really struck by the range of great questions that the audience posed to our speakers, and the value of bringing researchers together with the public in this space was crystal clear.
Host Ella presenting the speakers with their commemorative Pint Of Science '23 pint glasses
During the course of the festival we both had the opportunity to personally host one of the three pub events. Speaking to a large audience such as this is always a nerve-wracking experience, but we had a huge amount of fun entertaining the crowd around our speakers’ presentations. The photos in this blog post were taken on the first night, hosted by Ella. These were captured by a professional photographer who came along to the event, conveniently allowing us to share with you what a packed Pint of Science event looks like!
The audience captured by a professional photographer at the first night of Pint of Science 2023
For the grand finale on Wednesday night, our theme was “This time it’s personal(ity)”. As you might guess from the title, our speakers gave talks on two different aspects of personality. Firstly, Dr. Youyou Wu from the Institute of Education spoke on the variety of things that artificial intelligence can achieve when it knows about individuals’ personalities, including better music recommendations and targeted advertising. After a short break involving MRI scans of various fruit (and our final quiz of the week), Prof. Sonia Johnson presented on the difficulties facing people with a diagnosis of a personality disorder. While we were apprehensive about covering such a difficult topic in a pub at 8:45pm, our fears were quickly allayed by the excellent speaker and audience, and we left knowing that we had facilitated some very important discussions.
It was very interesting seeing how academics at different levels approached delivering a presentation to the general public. As PhD students, we are all too used to seeing and giving scientific talks aimed at academic audiences, filled with scientific jargon and complex information. Effectively communicating research findings to a wider audience is such a useful, important skill for us academics. Hence this type of an event felt important to organise and there was a lot for us to learn not only from organising it but also from seeing how other researchers approached the challenge of communicating their findings in a simple and understandable way.
Andrew Waterhouse leading a mindfulness practice in the pub
It was a great honour and good fun organising Pint of Science 2023 (we didn’t just do it for the free t-shirts and pint glasses)! We would both highly encourage anyone interested to get on board your local organising committee for Pint of Science 2024. With a good team and great structure laid out for the events it wasn’t too much work to organise even on the side of our studies. In turn it gave us the opportunity to network with our peers and interesting academics in the fields that interest us, as well as get some crucial experience in organising a successful science communication event and in disseminating scientific research to wider audiences.
The commemorative 10th anniversary Pint of Science pint glass