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Josh Award Winner 2015 Announced!

12 Jun 2015 10:14 AM | Anonymous
You heard it here first... Professor Andy Miah is the worthy winner of this year's Josh Award.

Andy is Chair in Science Communication & Future Media in the School of Environment & Life Sciences at University of Salford. Andy is renowned for his research into bioethics and emerging technologies and was recently a Google Glass explorer. Now developing virtual reality art installations and drone documentaries, Andy has published in such places as TIME, Wired, and regularly appears in the media, offering commentaries on new discoveries. His research has taken him to over 50 countries and spans such areas as genetics, nanotechnology, neuroscience, mobile health, wearable technologies, and digital innovations. He is particularly interested around the possibility of bringing creative digital media skills to the field of science communication and published one of the first articles to address the potential of digital media to create new kinds of public engagement with science possibilities. He is also part of the European City of Science steering group, set up to create a programme for Greater Manchester, as it hosts the European Science Forum in 2016.

“I am absolutely thrilled to be this year’s Josh award winner, not least because the BIG event happens in my home city of Norwich... I got into communicating science as a PhD student, trained myself on building websites and doing all I could to make academic discoveries reach more people and this work continues. I am passionate about open knowledge initiatives and believe firmly that there is no expertise that can’t be cultivated by anyone. I am really excited about the trend towards citizen science and in my own production of science communication programmes, I want to enable more people to find a way into nurturing their own scientific expertise. Programmes like the maker movement, FameLab, and hackathons do so much to make science and technology meaningful to people again, in a world where it can become even more difficult to grasp. Having worked in Manchester now for just 8 months, I’ve been amazed by the spirit of collaboration in the city and region, and the ambition of the people around here.”

“Over the last year, I’ve been working a lot with drones, experimenting with their creative possibilities, working with scientists to explore their potential as data capture tools. It’s an area that is completely exploding now and I’m not sure the world is ready for it. I’ve always been attracted to that kind of problem. Whether it’s genetic modification, stem cell technology, or wearable devices, what interests me is the ethical dilemmas they create and what they say about our future. Science communication through ethical debate has been a hallmark of my work and I’d love to foreground this during my year as Josh Award winner.”  


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