Interview with Professor Adam Hart, about his contribution to the Festival
11th May 2017
Q1: Who are you / what do you do?
A1: I’m Professor of Science Communication at the University, based in the School of Natural and Social Sciences. As well as the usual teaching and research, my role also includes a substantial amount of public engagement through events, writing and broadcasting.
Q2: What are you going to tell us about at the Festival of Learning?
A2: I’m a NTF and that application, in 2010, was based largely around the way I combined teaching research and public engagement work. Since then I have developed many more engagement activities and explored other ways to combine them. In this lightning presentation I will explore the idea that becoming a publicly-engaged academic has knock-on, positive, effects on student engagement. You may not agree with me, and by the end I may not agree with myself, but it’s an interesting area to consider as we think about ways to engage students and enhance experience.
Q3: Which other Lightning Presentation or Paper from the programme are you most looking forward to (and, if you know, why)?
A3: I’m looking forward to the session Not reading but learning by Abigail Gardner… I think there may be some interesting insights on how people learn through watching and listening.
Q4: If people only remember one thing from your talk/session/paper – a single sentence – what should that be?
A4: Publicly-engaged academics make for learning-engaged students.
A biologist, broadcaster and author, Adam Hart is Professor of Science Communication at UoG. His research interests include citizen science approaches to ecology (in collaboration with the Royal Society of Biology), wildlife management and more general ecology and behaviour as well as leafcutting ant behaviour. Adam teaches behaviour, evolutionary ecology and biological modelling and, together with colleagues, takes students on a two-week field course to the African bush each year. Adam is a frequent broadcaster on radio and TV, co-presenting the BBC TV documentaries Planet Ant and Hive Alive and presenting >20 documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Word Service on topics as diverse as tree diseases, trophy hunting, the rhino horn trade and swarm robotics. He also presents the weekly programme Science in Action for BBC World Service. His first popular science book, The Life of Poo, covering our complex relationship with bacteria was published in 2015.