Nothing in science has any value to society if it is not communicated

Anne Roe

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Communication is not something you add on to science. It is the essence of science

Alan Alda

2019 was another strong year of growth for ACEMS when it came to communications for ACEMS. Increasing numbers of our researchers attracted the attention of Australia’s leading news outlets, while the Centre's social media presence saw substantial growth.

2019 was another strong year of growth for ACEMS when it came to communications for ACEMS. Increasing numbers of our researchers attracted the attention of Australia’s leading news outlets, while the Centre's social media presence saw substantial growth.

News organisations like the ABC and the Nine Media Group (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Times, WA Today) featured Centre members and research in more than 100 print and online stories. In addition, ACEMS researchers did eight radio interviews talking about their projects or providing maths and stats expertise to issues in the news.

Also, our researchers provided that same expertise to The Conversation with eight stories in 2019. That included some beneficial analysis before and after the 2019 Australian Federal election. Other topics looked into gender bias in student feedback for university teachers, sports with the State of Origin, and whether Data Science needs its own Hippocratic Oath.

ACEMS brought back another season of its podcast, The Random Sample, exploring new and different topics with ties to the mathematical sciences.

The Centre continued to grow it’s brand on social media as well. Most notably, ACEMS grew its audience on Twitter by a third, and also saw the number of tweet impressions (the number of times a tweet shows up in someone’s feed) shoot up to nearly 900,000 in 2019. That’s up 35 per cent from 2018.

ACEMS on Facebook also showed strong growth with post ‘likes’ and story ‘shares’ both more than doubling over the year.

Our YouTube channel continues to be a reliable source for our public lectures and research talks.

One of the highlights for ACEMS communications in 2019 is the number of Centre members who took part in media training. ACEMS worked with three other ARC Centres of Excellence to co-host three communication and media training workshops. In total, 20 ACEMS researchers attended those three workshops which covered topics like talking to the media, pitch training, body language, and story-telling.

“It was great to see so many Centre members jump at the chance to work on these skills. It was an easy sell, and I personally was impressed at how well they were able to pick up and embrace what we showed them,” said Tim Macuga, ACEMS Media and Communications Officer.

Other Centres involved included the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX), the ARC Centre of Excellence for Convergent Bio-Nano Science and Technology (CBNS), the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET), and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science (ACEx).

Frontier research and engaged researchers can only add up to big things in the future, and we look forward to seeing ACEMS members in the news even more during 2020.