You received a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Please, tell us a bit more about the scholarship.
The program lasts for about a year. The stay in Germany begins with an obligatory two-month intensive German language course, a four-week introductory seminar and eleven months of individual project work.
My project had to do with the practical aspects of science communication in Russia. There are two conditions the participants of the program must comply with: first, the project should be conducive to advancing fellows’ career development. That was easy, since I’ve been studying science communication my whole life, and what I needed was an academic background in this field.
Second, you have to explain, why you want to conduct your research in Germany and how it can contribute to the development of German-Russian relations. It wasn’t difficult either: ITMO University and Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences have signed a research collaboration agreement that includes student exchange and many other activities.
I also had an opportunity to work at Dublin City University within the program. So I engaged in collaboration with this university as well as with a few universities in the Netherlands. So I think that the Fellowship program offers a great opportunity to promote your university abroad and support the development of connections between your university and foreign universities. We’re planning to launch some projects together with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Now we are applying for a scholarship and it takes time.
The program is open to researchers working in various fields, such as architecture, and law. And it’s so great, because I wouldn’t meet all these wonderful people in ordinary life. There is no better way to get familiar with Germany, too: as a part of our educational program we visited Deutsche Bahn, both chambers of Parliament and the Constitutional Court of Germany, and even met with Angela Merkel and the President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Helmut Schwarz.
How did you organise your research project?
Every researcher has a scientific advisor, but everyone is responsible for their own projects. My research consisted of several big parts: first, I wanted to survey science communication practices in Russia, to learn how the market works. And second, I wanted to conduct research on the representation of science in the Russian media.
How do they assess your projects?
When the Fellowship program comes to an end, you are asked to give feedback on the program and what you liked and disliked about it. But it’s not like all these countless reports we write in Russia, it’s something completely different. The scholarship program assumes that applicants have a better idea of what to do and there is no point in controlling them.
In your opinion, what German experience can Russia learn from? There are many scicomm projects in Germany, for example The Science Information Service (IDW). What do you think about that?
The most important thing I learned from my scholarship is that there are no ready-made solutions. You can’t just adopt some experience as it is, without adapting it to our needs. On the other hand, when people say “we need our own solutions”, they often imply that they don’t need “anything else”. And this is also wrong. To come up with our own solutions, we have to acquire international experience and understand how it works. And then we’ll see the results.
The problem with science communication is that we don’t understand how science and society communicate, and how to address Russian scientists. That’s why the sociology of science is so important.
Can you tell us about your current projects?
There is this project, that I started working on in Germany, on the representation of science in the Russian media. We collect all the publications in the top ten popular Russian magazines (both online and in-print versions) over the last year and search for the keywords “biotechnologies”, “nuclear energetics”, and “climate change”. The purpose of the study is to understand how popular Russian media represent science.
Then, there is a project on corporate scientific communication. This year it will take place at ITMO University. Within the framework of this project, we want to find out how Russian universities and institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences (more than 3000 organizations) organise communication. It is a very difficult thing to study and it takes time and we will only get one page with graphs and figures but it’s worth it because it allows us to understand the market.
These are the projects I’m working on, but there are many more interesting projects at Science Communication and Outreach Office, including those coordinated by Dmitry Malkov, Head of Science Communication and Outreach Office. We were the first in Russia to conduct our research on Altmetric's data. Altmetric is a system that tracks the attention that research outputs that scholarly articles and datasets receive online.
