Professor Peter Shepherd FRSNZ, a member of Healthier Lives Scientific Leadership Team, has been awarded the Callaghan Medal by Royal Society Te Apārangi. The medal is for pioneering activities to increase the understanding of science by the New Zealand public.

The formal citation reads:
To Peter Robin Shepherd for his pioneering work in transferring scientific knowledge to the community, including developing new mechanisms for communicating science to secondary school biology teachers and students, and his role in developing major events connecting leading scientists with the public.

Professor Shepherd says that school-based science communication activities can be highly effective:

“In our rush to find better ways to communicate science we have sometimes undervalued the most obvious way of doing this, which is through schools.

“Continual upskilling and empowering of our science teachers and developing new school-based science programmes is something we haven’t done well in the past but is a really cost effective way of getting more members of our communities to understand and buy in to the real benefits science offers our society.”

Source: Royal Society Te Apārangi

Read the full article in the Royal Society Te Apārangi website:

2017 Callaghan Medal: Upskilling society in science