Learning to ‘selling’ our science with the ECRN

At the recent ESRS congress in Basel, we hosted a session ‘Selling your science’ with science documentary maker Nelleke Koop, science TV producer Wiesje Kuijpers and past ECRN coordinator Erna Sif Arnardottir. As scientists, our relationship with the media can sometimes feel like a tug of war over accurately portraying our research and producing an entertaining program/article. Nelleke and Wiesje gave us an insight from the side of the media and how to distil the ‘story’ of our research into three sentences: the problem, the method and the findings. We also got some great tips for ‘selling’ our research to our peers – our favourite: make sure your paper has a figure that represents your main findings that can easily be used by others to present your work!

This year we had six early career researchers wanting to join the committee, we are so pleased to have so much interest in helping grow our network. Following our first election, Annemarie and Corrado were voted to join the team – read more about our team here. We also hosted our first networking event with the help of our sponsor Nox Medical, on Wednesday night – it was really great to meet so many ECRN members and we hope lifelong connections were made.

Currently we are working on how to keep our members connected outside of ESRS conferences and meetings. We are working closely with the web committee to ensure the new website offers features making it possible to register yourself as an ECRN member, have a member profile that allows you to make connections with all of the European sleep community and a forum to further enable communication and education between members. If you are interested in being involved in this process, we would love to hear from you: do drop an email to Kate (kate.porcheret@ndcn.ox.ac.uk). Lastly, be sure to join our Facebook group (ESRS Early Career Researcher Network) to get all the regular updates – exciting things are planned to happen soon!