Will Boston succeed in its ambitious, $4.5 billion proposal to host the 2024 Summer Olympics? Sports fans will have to wait a couple of years for the International Olympic Committee to decide.
But meanwhile, if there’s anything close to the Olympic Games in science journalism, the Boston area has already won it.
Several years ago, Knight Science Journalism at MIT put in a successful bid to host ScienceWriters2015—and now the event is just around the corner.
We couldn’t be more thrilled about the opportunity to welcome the best minds in our profession to Cambridge, and to showcase research and innovation at MIT and other Boston-area institutions.
But to make the meeting a success, we’re going to need all the help we can get from local friends and supporters. So with this note, I wanted to provide some updates about the meeting, and invite the local science writing community to start sharing ideas.
After successful recent conferences in Research Triangle, NC, Gainesville, FL, and Columbus, OH, Science Writers—which, as everyone knows, is an annual joint meeting organized by the National Association of Science Writers and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing—will come to Cambridge October 9-13, 2015.
We’ll kick off on Friday, Oct. 9, with some pre-conference workshops at at the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, and a big welcome reception in Morss Hall at MIT’s Walker Memorial.
Then comes a day of professional development workshops, run by members of NASW.
On Sunday, October 11, the scene will shift to Kresge Auditorium and the Stratton Student Center, at the center of the MIT campus, for CASW’s New Horizons in Science briefings.
I’m working closely with Ros Reid, the executive director of CASW, to make sure that the New Horizons podium talks and panels include an exciting mix of local researchers. The activities we’re planning include “Lunch with a Scientist”—always one of the most popular parts of the conference—not to mention tours of local laboratories and field trips to top New England science destinations.
All of those plans are coming together right now. We’ll share the full details when the ScienceWriters2015 conference information and registration site goes live in August.
How can you get involved? I’m glad you asked.
—Now is the time to suggest ideas for field trips to Boston-area locations of scientific interest. If you work for a company, a museum, a hospital, or a research institution that might want to host a group of ScienceWriter2015 attendees, or if you just have an idea for a great field trip destination, please get in touch with me at wroush@mit.edu. We’re locking down ideas for field trips right now.
—Social events are a huge part of the ScienceWriters conference. Plans for the Friday welcome reception and the Saturday awards banquet are well underway. But we’re still brainstorming venue/format/content ideas for events on Sunday evening and Monday evening.
In this area, I anticipate that we’ll get a lot of help from groups like New England Science Writers, which has done such an amazing job hosting bashes for visiting science journalists during recent AAAS meetings in Boston. But there’s still time and opportunity for other folks to step forward with ideas. Again, please get in touch with me at wroush@mit.edu.
—We will probably need local volunteers to help with on-site tasks such as guiding attendees to the proper locations for lectures, lunch talks, and field trips. If you’re interested in adding your name to the list of potential volunteers, please write to KSJ program administrator Bianca Sinausky at singleta@mit.edu.
—Even as we work on lining up a great program and tons of social events, we’re also raising money to offset the costs of the conference and make ScienceWriters2015 the best event possible. If you work for a company or organization that might be interested in sponsoring the event—and getting its name in front of a large fraction of the world’s population of science writers—please contact me at, you guessed it, wroush@mit.edu. I can provide a summary of sponsorship tiers and the benefits to sponsors at each tier.
Given the exciting Cambridge/Boston setting, we’re optimistic that the MIT edition of ScienceWriters2015 will smash all recent attendance records. So this is a meeting you won’t want to miss. Get in touch now to share your ideas, and check back here or at www.sciencewriters2015.org for more details as the year goes on. See you in October!
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