Three more keynote speakers announced

We are very excited to highlight three more keynote speakers who will be coming to Perth for ASC2024, Support, Connect, Grow: Dr Temilade Sesan, Associate Professor Dianne Sika-Paotonu and Associate Professor Joseph Roche. We look forward to meeting our keynote speakers in Perth and hearing about science communication practice, policy and research from very diverse perspectives.

Dr Temilade Sesan

Temilade Sesan is a sociologist with over 10 years’ research and consulting experience in international development. Her research examines the socioeconomic dimensions of the food-energy-waste nexus, especially as they intersect with issues of the environment, gender, health and urban planning in Africa. A key focus of her work is highlighting the social and cultural upheavals that often accompany seemingly benign processes of technological and economic advancement in the region. More broadly, her work contributes to the discourse on decolonising knowledge production and science communication for inclusive development in the global south. She teaches and supervises postgraduate students at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Associate Professor Joseph Roche

Joseph Roche is an Associate Professor in Science Education at Trinity College Dublin. He is the Director of Research at the School of Education and leads the Science & Society Research Group which coordinates international research projects on science communication, informal learning, citizen science, public engagement, and higher education science. He was the Principal Investigator of Global SCAPE (a European Commission funded research project exploring the global state of science communication) and is a partner on the COALESCE project (a follow-up European Commission funded project to establish a European Science Communication Competence Centre). Joseph has worked at NASA and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. He is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and is the author of the textbook “Essential Skills for Early Career Researchers”.

Associate Professor Dianne Sika-Paotonu

Dianne Sika-Paotonu is an Associate Professor (Immunology) and Associate Dean (Pacific) for the Division of Health Sciences at the University of Otago. She is a Fulbright Scholar, an experienced research scientist, educator, science communicator and commentator. Dianne regularly presents at scientific conferences, and over the years has received national and international awards relating to her research work and science communication efforts. Most recently, she was awarded the 2022 Prime Minister's Science Communication Prize. She holds numerous service and leadership responsibilities and contributes to local, national and international groups, committees and boards, functioning as chair and/or convenor for many of these.