Dr Adam Roberts wins 2015 Outreach Prize
17 September 2015
The Society for General Microbiology's 2015 Outreach Prize was awarded to Dr Adam Roberts, a Senior Lecturer at the UCL Eastman Dental Institute. Adam received his prize at the Society’s Annual General Meeting, recognising his continuing efforts to engage the public about antibiotics and the problems associated with antibiotic resistance. Central to this is Adam’s crowdfunded ‘Swab and Send’ project, which sees members of the public taking environmental swabs and sending them in to be analysed. We asked him about the project and the benefits of outreach projects.
What made you want to follow a career in science?
When I was at school, I was never satisfied with the answers the teachers gave. I always tried to get more knowledge; some of the teachers were quite receptive, but others didn’t take it so well! I could always tell that there was a lot more that they didn’t know and that prompted me to read around different subjects from an early age. The limited genetics I did during my GCSEs really piqued my interest, which I ultimately decided to follow on until degree level. This never really stopped.
How would you explain your research?
My group and I are looking at antibiotic resistance: how it arises and how it spreads. We’re also looking for new antimicrobials – we’re coming at the problem from both sides.
Which side do you think will be more fruitful?
Understanding resistance is perhaps a more fruitful side; it’s just so difficult to find and develop a new drug in an academic lab. Pharmaceutical companies have hundreds of people working on a project and/or twenty million candidate compounds. Sadly I have neither of those, so things are a little slower on that front…
Can you remember your first outreach activity?
It was a talk at the Richard Hale School in Hertford, where one of my friends is the Head of Science. She was really interested in the work I was doing as a young academic and asked if I could give a talk to her A-Level students on the topic, and about further education in science. That went down really well and gave me the confidence to sign up for the Biology4All speaker database, which took me to lots of different schools and colleges.
How did you feel in the lead up to this talk?
I was terrified – it was a completely unknown audience. I’d never done anything like it before and I’d had no training or preparation, so it really was a step into the unknown. It’s totally different to when you give a scientific talk at a meeting, or even to your lab group – you just don’t know what the audience is going to be like. I had the full spectrum, from keen students at the front, who came up and asked questions, to those at the back who weren’t really listening – but you can’t take that personally. But that’s something I learnt doing this, you can’t take things personally. If you change someone’s life then you’ve done an extremely good job.
Why do you do outreach?
Because I think we should. When I was at school there wasn’t much science outreach going on. As I’ve said, I was interested in science from an early age, but that was never really nurtured and I think it’s really important to do that. Thankfully more and more schools are. Of course I enjoy it as well, it’s a nice break from the rigours of scientific activity. Feedback is always nice – I found out that a few students went into STEM courses based on the talks that I and other researchers gave.
How would you describe the Swab and Send project?
I don’t believe that we’ve found all of the antibiotics we’re going to find – we just need to look for more. I wanted to incorporate my research into an outreach activity, to sample ‘any old microbe’ and see if it produces a potential antibiotic. I couldn’t get funding for that from the Research Councils – it’s the epitome of a ‘stamp collecting’ exercise and is rightly not funded by taxpayer’s money.
So I thought another way to get the project started was to get the public to fund it themselves, paying a small amount of money and sending me the samples to analyse.
You used a crowdfunding website to launch Swab and Send. How did you think it was going to go?
I thought it’d be unlikely to succeed, but really I had nothing to lose – I’d invested no research money, only time. I was pleasantly surprised. I’d aimed to raise around £500 and decided to keep the project open for two months. Swab and Send was immediately picked up by ITV and The Guardian; we hit the initial target within the first week and doubled it by the end of the two months.
Aside from being an engagement project, has Swab and Send led to any academic collaborations as well?
Earlier this month, I had a new BBSRC-funded PhD student join to work on this project. That’s three years of funding that came as a direct result of the crowdfunding project. Another of my PhD students is looking for antibiofilm compounds and she’s since screened a few Swab and Send isolates and already got some interesting ones to investigate further.
What will you be talking about in your presentation today?
I’m going to outline the pros and cons of using social media in science outreach, using examples from Swab and Send. I’ll talk about crowdfunding and about getting the pledgers involved, which was the key to Swab and Send, allowing them to take ownership of the project.
I’m also going to talk about work in other media, including the Wellcome Trust-funded Surgeon X comic, and working with Wellcome and Radio 4 on their Experimental Stories programme.
Finally, I’m going to finish off with some results from Swab and Send, because it is a scientific endeavour, at the end of the day.
The next phase of the Swab and Send project is open. For more information, please visit https://ucl.hubbub.net/p/swab-and-send-II
Image: Adam Roberts.