UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies

STS's Dr Simon Werrett has been awarded a grant from the new UCL Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects (CHIRP) headed by Prof. Lisa Jardine, as a contributor to Leonie Hannan and Kate Smith’s project “100 Hours”. The project will involve nineteen participants from universities and museums across the UK and USA and see five seminars take place over 2013-14 exploring a series of objects from interdisciplinary perspectives. A blog and website will offer opportunities to follow the progress of the group.

The STS department, in collaboration with UCL's Public Engagement Unit and UCL Outreach, has recently developed a suite of new training courses for postgraduate students relating to public engagement skills.  The courses, run as part of the Graduate School's Skills Development Programme, were piloted for the first time this year, to great acclaim by the participants involved.  Feedback from the courses included:

Booking is now available for STS20, celebrating 20 years of our undergraduate programmes.

• 18 October 2013, in the evening, at UCL. Booking is now up and running:  www.stsreunion.eventbrite.co.uk

Applications for our brand new MSc courses in Science, Technology and Society and in the History and Philosophy of Science, starting September 2013, have been coming in thick and fast all of this year. For those who are considering applying but haven't yet done so there is still time to apply with the last date applications can be submitted this year being the 2nd August 2013.

Both MScs can be studied full or part time and Postgraduate Certificate and Postgraduate Diploma options are also available.

For more information on the content and application processes go to: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/prospective/msc/uclmastersdegrees

Jack Stilgoe was quoted in a feature in Nature this week, talking about the recent proliferation of new prizes for science. The article was sceptical of the importance of such prizes. Here's what Jack says  “The suspicion is that these provide more benefit to the egos of the founders than to science… The idea that anyone would make a career choice based on the minuscule chance of winning, say, a Nobel, is ridiculous. Scientists, on the whole, are not in it for the money — and I am not sure we should want them to be…The prizes reinforce the mythology of science in which lone geniuses come up with brilliant ideas on their own.”

Simon Werrett’s article “Green is the Colour: St. Petersburg’s Chemical Laboratories and Competing Visions of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century” will appear in the journal Ambix this month, in a special issue devoted to “Sites of Chemistry” (Vol. 60 No. 2 (May 2013): 122–138). Werrett will also be speaking in Leuven, Belgium, on May 31, on the history of recycling in chemistry.

Dr Emma Tobin has been awarded an E-Learning Development Grant to support a summer internship at STS. The grant will support a summer intern to work as a Research and Production Assistant for the STS Careers Podcast Series. The work will be undertaken at the STS studio over the summer.  The STS recording Studio in 22 Gordon Square is a significant e-learning environment, which STS as a department is keen to utilise further for student projects, skills development and public engagement. This summer opportunity will allow the student to gain key training in research, recording and post-production. The successful student will also have the opportunity to pass on the skills to other STS students in the academic year 2013/2014 by running a number of small group training workshops. Details on how to apply will be available shortly

3rd Year STS Undergraduate Sinan John Richards (pictured) has been accepted as a speaker at the Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society Postgraduate Conference, which will take place at Middlesex University on 15 June.

Details of the conference can be found online here: http://www.onlinestore.mdx.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&catid=30&modid=5&prodid=147&deptid=11&prodvarid=0

Sinan will present material from his undergraduate dissertation, "Psychoanalysis in Pain?", which explores the journey of the concept of the unconscious across science and philosophy.

Our warmest congratulations to Sinan who worked extremely hard on his dissertation. His efforts are paying off!

Dr Jon Agar has been commended by The British Society for the History of Science for his book, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Polity, link). 

UCL's Department of Science and Technology Studies seeks to appoint a Research Associate in Cold War History.

On Thursday 30th May UCL STS welcomed Stuart Glennan from Butler University as a visiting academic and held a workshop on Mechanisms and Causality in Philosophy of Science. The event was organised by STS lecturer Phyllis Illari and featured presentations from Stuart Glennan (Butler), John Pemberton (LSE), Toby Field (UCL) as well as STS's  Phyllis Illari and Brendan Clarke.

It's been a great week for STSers on the BBC!

Starting us off we have STS PhD student Mat Paskins spoke at Somerset House for BBC Radio 4's Four Thought series.

Simon Werrett spoke at UCL's new Institute of Making on Friday 19 April about "Material Histories of Science". Werrett asked what a new history of material qualities might look like, and explored the history of that essential academic material - red ink!

UCL's Department of Science and Technology Studies seeks to appoint a full time Senior Lecturer in Science Communication.

On April 4^th 2013, Dr Brian Balmer gave a talk entitled “The Social Dimension of Technology” at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Education and Language, University of La Laguna, Tenerife. The talk was given to staff and students as part of their two day annual research conference and Faculty celebration.

Brian Balmer is to be the co-investigator on an eighteen month project funded by the ESRC and AHRC as a part of their Science and Security Progamme. The project is entitled The Formulation and Non-formulation of Security Concerns:Preventing the Destructive Application of the Life Sciences. The project involves a number of researchers compiling case studies on how security issues become "non-issues" in policy debate about biological weapons control. Brian will contribute a case study on the history of concerns over genetic engineering. The principal investigator on the project is Professor Brian Rappert at the University of Exeter. Ten projects were funded overall, of which two received AHRC support.

The STS Department wishes the UCL Team the very best of luck in their University Challenge semi-final. The team, which includes STS undergraduate Simon Dennis as captain, have battled their way through numerous tricky questions to get to the penultimate round. Get ready to cheer them on!

Every year, we run a course called Action for Global Citizenship HPSC2017A/B. The objective is to get our second-year students to engage with the real world in a different way. Rather than coming to lectures and writing essays, this module asks them to plan and carry out an 'action'. This might be an event, a performance, a thing that they make or build. In the spring term term, our class split into two groups.

Jack Stilgoe was recently a member of an expert group advising the European Commission on approaches to responsible research and innovation. The report looks at options for how science policy can encourage greater responsibility for the direction and broad implications of scientific research and innovation. This report has been covered in this week's Research Europe http://www.researchprofessional.com/news/article/1313166/. In the story, Jack is quoted as saying that “RRI is a new term to describe a set of old concepts… RRI is about getting more from science and innovation, not just stopping certain things that we find troubling.”

STS Lecturer Simon Werrett spoke in Rome on March 15 on the relations of technology and religion in the early modern period, beginning (appropriately in light of recent events at the Vatican) with an exploration of fireworks staged for the election of a new Pope in Rome in the sixteenth century. The talk was part of a conference examining the role of stage machinery, spectacle and theatre in religious festivals and practices in early modern Europe.

Congratulations to STS BSc student Simon Dennis and the rest of the UCL University Challenge Team. Yesterday the team beat the University of Manchester in their second quarter final round draw to go through to semi finals.

STS Research Fellow, Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock (MBE) has been mentioned by UCL Provost in his 04 March 2013 newsletter:

Above average teaching

UCL Natural Sciences programme has released data from Term 1 teaching in modules taken by first year students. STS scores above average, largely due to the efforts of Dr Simon Lock and Dr Brendan Clarke. Well done. 

A team of UCL graduate students including STS PhD Student Steph Ratcliffe have been selected to organise 11th annual masterclass for the British Postgraduate Philosophy Association. The team, which also includes Akosua Bonsu, Emily Crampton from the UCL Philosophy Department will host the event at UCL on 14 and 15th of April 2013. The masterclass will explore issues around Philosophy and Mental Health. More details on the event website.

Final year students - it's time to have your say about your degree. The National Student Survey (NSS) is now open. This is an opportunity to speak up confidentially in a nationwide poll about universities. The data from the NSS feeds into government statistics about courses and affects how your degree is represented to potential employers and future students.