DR MELANIE QUIN 1958 – 2025
It is fair to say that without Melanie Quin, BIG would not exist. In the early days of British science centres in the late 1980s, Melanie was recruited by the Nuffield Foundation to run their Interactive Science and Technology Project, which had been set up to provide a support network for the new field. Melanie came to science centres after studying botany at Imperial College, culminating in a PhD on pollen distribution, which included a summer stint on Thames TV’s weather forecast as “pollen count girl”. A talented artist, she initially hoped to be a botanical illustrator, but having been advised there was no money in it, went into publishing, from where she was recruited by Nuffield. Once at Nuffield, she set to with characteristic energy and charm, connecting and advising the new centres and their staff, sending out frequent bulletins made up of an assortment of useful snippets from all kinds of sources, stapled together and mailed out hot off the press, which were an amazing resource for the new field. She also ran important early science centre networking events, including the first of the influential Fabricators Weeks for exhibit builders. It was at Nuffield that I first met Melanie, after joining Leicestershire Museums in mid-1988 to set up the hands-on galleries at Snibston Discovery Park. Having spoken to her on the phone, I was expecting a rather older person, so was surprised to be greeted by a tiny, vivacious woman with spiky hair and huge, lively eyes, about the same age as me. We hit it off immediately and were firm friends from then on.
Melanie’s ability to make friends, to network, and to command universal respect was formidable; she seemed to immediately know and be respected by everyone in the field, everywhere, not just in the UK. It was this, though, that led her to be tempted away in the early 90s to be the first director of the European science centre network ECSITE, based at Heureka in Finland. This left a huge vacuum in the UK, and as a result Bhagwant Singh at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry rounded up a group of us to create a networking organization to continue what Melanie had started, and this was BIG. It is a testament to Melanie that it required a whole organisation to do what she had been doing alone. Melanie’s amazing charm, organisation, and networking skills swiftly got ECSITE on its feet and it was soon a professional body second only in influence to the long-established ASTC in the US. Having achieved this, Melanie decided to have a go at science centre building herself and joined the team developing what eventually became NEMO in Amsterdam, although she continued to edit the ECSITE newsletter for many years – she was one of the best writers and editors I have ever worked with, and we collaborated on several projects.
Regrettably, NEMOs early stages were a fraught affair and Melanie did not thrive there, so returned to the UK to join the much happier ship at Techniquest, where she set up and ran the Science Communication MSc programme with Glamorgan University. This was a triumph, and Melanie swiftly established it as an influential course, unique in its emphasis on science centres and practical face-to face sci comms, as opposed to the media-centred nature of the more academic courses. Many graduates have gone on to distinguished careers in the field, with Melanie as a much-loved mentor. The MSc’s later closure left a gap that has still not been adequately filled. During this time, Melanie also reconnected with UK networking, serving on the BIG committee, mainly as its Chair, or “the BIG Sofa” as she liked to describe herself, during a period that truly established the organisation on the UK sci coms landscape
By 2001, with the arrival of giant Millennium Projects, the lack of a UK organisational network for science centres (BIG was always for individuals) became apparent. As a result, Wellcome and Gillian Thomas set up the semi-autonomous ECSITE-UK (later becoming fully independent as ASDC), and, with the call of networking too hard to resist, Melanie left Techniquest to be its director. This, too, was a Melanie success, and she presided over it until 2006, when she made what was to most of us a startling decision; choosing leave science communication to train as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language. “I just felt it was time for a change” she told me. Melanie’s influence on science centres and science communication in the UK and Europe was vast; the field would be significantly different and distinctly impoverished today had she not been there to guide and support its development, and many of us owe her an immense and lasting debt of gratitude.
As a language teacher, Melanie’s career took her first to Istanbul, and then to Lyon, where she married Andy, an old university friend who was designing the city’s new tramway. She continued to keep in touch with science communication developments via her many friends from the field with whom she remained in contact, and who continued to visit her, even when Andy’s tramway career took them further afield to Sydney, Australia. From there, I enjoyed receiving colourful reports of birdwatching trips and musical adventures, and we had been emailing about meeting up when she was next in the UK. In August 2024, though, Melanie received a diagnosis of terminal illness and was told to expect five to ten years. Sadly, this was not to be, and she slipped away peacefully while receiving palliative care in Sydney on 19th August.
Melanie is survived by her husband, Andy, and her brother Thomas, Abbot of Mucknell Abbey in Worcestershire. A London memorial service will take place in the near future.
IAN SIMMONS
Ian Simmons is a semi-retired science communicator, a BIG founder, and a long serving former committee member. He worked for Science Projects, Techniquest, The Centre for Life, the Francis Crick Institute and the Royal Society, and as an independent consultant. He is now part time news editor for Fortean Times.
