Postgraduate research in Science Communication was put on the table and under discussion this morning at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz in Salvador, Bahia, this Monday morning.

“Postgraduate research network in science communication” was hosted by Brian Trench (Dublin City University), Vanessa Brasil (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Maarten van der Sanden (Delft University of Technology) and had the participation of around 40 postgraduate researchers, both in PhD and Master degree levels. Trench called the attention to the interdisciplinary nature of sci-comm and to the challenges still to be defied within this emerging field - where most practitioners are women, he pointed out.

The main objective was to get researchers with similar interests to engage with and know each other - but also to discuss what is the current state of Science Communication research. And with quite interesting results: Van der Sanden presented a preliminary mapping of sci-comm PhD theses defended in the countries which were the three latest to host PCST: India, Italy and now, Brazil. Out of 141 of them, most focused on the practical aspects of science education, means of communication, citizen engagement and museums museums. Theory and online media seemed to lag behind all others.

Van der Sanden saw the workshop “filled with researchers eager to tackle the research problems we have in Science Communication today”, and, in this sense, getting them together “is very important to the field because we need cutting-edge research in the area so we can have an evolution - or revolution - within Science Communication”.