Residency Project

I would like to use the knowledge and insight gained at Faculty of the medicine in Rijeka for a series of stories – about the development of smart vaccines that target more efficient immune responses against particular infectious diseases, about still not fully explained mechanism of our immune response and about the reasons why is diabetes becoming one of the most prevalent chronic diseases of our time. I’m planning to conduct as many interviews as I can with different scientists during the residency.
There is also another, somewhat complex topic I would like to explore – the Faculty of Medicine in Rijeka is known to host one of the largest mouse facilities in the EU. Thanks to this, they have 100 different immunologically deficient mouse strains that are used to perform in vivo research in immunology to viral infections and tumors. This topic is interesting to me as a potential feature or even investigative story because these kinds of animal research facilities are getting limited in some EU countries by the new regulations. To my knowledge, some of the foreign scientists are now increasingly contacting Medical faculty in Rijeka for certain kinds of research that they cannot perform in their country due to regulations. I would like to find out more about this kind of facility first-hand (by observing this work) to be able to write a story about this sensitive topic and the new regulations in some EU countries.

My second goal is to use this residency to further develop the idea of making a short handbook – how to talk about vaccines and viruses for the public and the mainstream media. The idea is an extension of my general short handbook “Science and the Media” (containing useful tips for scientists on how to collaborate more efficiently with the media and how to present complex scientific knowledge to the public) published last year by the University of Rijeka as an open-source document.
I would like to use the residency and expertise of scientists involved in the research mentioned above to identify the key points in the subjects of vaccines, viruses and immunology – the ones that are often misinterpreted in the media and need to be explained better to the public. Through the interviews, conversations and surveys with the scientists at this institution, I hope to better understand those concepts and find the best way to communicate them to the wider audience, which will hopefully serve me for the development of a good project idea for the handbook.

I would also like to organize, during the residency, at least one workshop that I previously developed for scientists on how to collaborate more efficiently with the media and how to present complex scientific knowledge to the public. I’m always trying to adapt the workshops for particular science fields or lines of research – using particular practical examples and I’m always keen to find out which are the most problematic media questions for scientists from a particular science field.