a-ch.in/ty-a · 🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈

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Hello! My name is Achintya Rao and I write about science and science communication. My first name is spelt ಅಚಿಂತ್ಯಾ in Kannada and अचिन्त्या in the Devanagari script; its IPA pronunciation is ɐtʃint̪jaː. I was born in in Bombay 🇮🇳 and grew up in New Bombay. I live in Bristol 🇬🇧 since . You can find me online as “RaoOfPhysics”.

I work at UWE Bristol, the University of the West of England, as the Science Communication and Engagement Manager for the COALESCE project. For a few months in , I worked for the University of Cambridge on Fluid – an open-source programming language being developed for explorable, self-explanatory visualisation of research data – and occasionally contribute to it in my own time. I previously served as Community Manager for the AI for Science and Government research programme at The Alan Turing Institute, before which I spent over a decade as a science communicator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

In , I obtained a PhD in science communication from UWE Bristol 🇬🇧. I also have an MA in science journalism from City University London 🇬🇧 and a BSc in physics from St Xavier’s College, Bombay 🇮🇳.

In what spare time I have, I enjoy singing, playing my bass guitar and cajón, watching and playing cricket, reading, and tinkering with technology.

I am a native speaker of English but Kannada is my mother tongue. I also speak Hindi/Urdu, broken Marathi, a bit of French and Spanish (the former with a Genevan accent 🇨🇭 and latter with an Argentine one 🇦🇷), and am learning Italian.

Oh, and I am a transgender lesbian (⚧️/♀️), which will explain my appearance in some of the media on this page. I began transitioning via gender-affirming hormone therapy in .

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Science Communication

At UWE, I host and produce the official COALESCE podcast, called “SciComm Conversations”, in which I speak with special guests on topics of interest to the science-communication community.

Please give it a listen and subscribe to it on your favourite podcast app:

Science Communication at CERN

I was a science communicator at CERN between and : for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration until and for CERN’s Education, Communication and Outreach group in the International Relations sector since . My work mainly involved writing about physics, accelerators, engineering and computing. As part of my job, I got to speak to a wide variety of people working at CERN and visit some of the laboratory’s most fascinating locations.

I spoke on the Ratio podcast about CERN and more, if you fancy a listen:

I was also interviewed, along with James Gillies, for the episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, in which I spoke about my memories of the discovery of the Higgs boson in :

But if you are a more visual person, here’s a video of me speaking to Professor Lucie Green about CMS and particle physics:

I was an official CERN guide, and took hundreds of visitors on tours of the CMS experimental site located in Cessy 🇫🇷. I represented the International Relations sector at the CERN Diversity Office’s roundtable for two years.

Here are a few of the articles I’ve written for the CERN website:

I have had the privilege of writing for the CERN Courier on a few occasions:

Freelance Writing

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, I was invited to publish a feature in Nature Reviews Physics:

I have had the occasional physics news article and feature published in the magazine Physics World:

I also briefly wrote for Geneva Solutions. Here is a selection of my articles:

Book Reviews

What could be more fun that being paid to read books? Here are some books I have reviewed:

Radio

As may be evident from the many links to podcasts above, I am a huge fan of the audio medium for storytelling. For a brief period, I hosted the radio show Love and Science on BCfm. It was great fun and I enjoyed learning how to do a live show on air.

Research

I was awarded a PhD in science communication from UWE in . Professor Emma Weitkamp was my director of studies. My thesis is titled “Particle physics and public engagement: A match made in minuscule matter”.

I studied the attitudes within the particle-physics community towards public engagement with science (or outreach), the factors that influence participation in such activities and barriers that prevent participation. My research focused on the CMS collaboration, which has over 4000 people, including physicists, engineers, technicians, computer scientists and students.

Abstract (English)

Public engagement with science and technology, or PEST, is a field of growing practice and study. There remain, however, notable gaps in our understanding of the attitudes of researchers towards public communication of science itself, particularly from fields of fundamental research that continue to be under-represented in our literature. The attitudes towards public engagement within the particle-physics community have been investigated in the doctoral research project described here.

The community under study is represented by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, sometimes known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The collaboration takes its name from the CMS experiment, a particle detector it operates at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider. CERN estimates that around half of the global community of particle physicists conduct their research at CERN.

The attitudes were explored through a mixed-methods approach grounded in pragmatism, with a collaboration-wide web-based survey, yielding 391 valid responses, followed by 19 personal interviews chosen by purposive sampling and conducted either in person or over a video call. The majority of the survey respondents showed favourable attitudes towards public engagement, sometimes also known as “outreach”, with scientists seeing participation as a duty and participating in public engagement without being required to. Belonging to a large research collaboration was also seen as advantageous for the purposes of outreach participation, partly because a sizeable group of researchers has a sense of shared responsibility towards a specific area of science, allowing resources to be shared and dedicated communications professionals to be hired.

There was a strong pedagogical bent to the types of public engagement scientists seek to participate in, with participatory paradigms ruled out by the majority of both survey respondents and interviewees. The practice of fundamental research was also framed by the interviewees as a cultural practice, taking physics back to its roots in “natural philosophy”.

The thesis concludes by recommending that evaluation of public engagement with science and technology consider the relative “relevance-distance” – the degree to which the field of research in question holds relevance to everyday human life – in determining what modes of engagement are suitable for a given field of research, so as not to paint fundamental sciences with a brush more suitable to applied fields of research. Further, as science-in-society research has made the case for there not being a single, homogeneous “public” but many self-identifying publics, depending on context, interest and relative levels of expertise, the fields studying the interplay between science and society need to think of PEST as public engagement with sciences and technologies, that is, in the plural, and resist the temptation to make sweeping generalisations about the applicability of our research findings and policy recommendations to a single, monolithic, uniform “science”.

Résumé (French)

L’engagement du public dans le domaine des sciences et technologies (« Public engagement with science and technology » en anglais, ou PEST) prend une place croissante et est de plus en plus étudié. Certains aspects sont cependant moins documentés, comme la position des chercheurs sur la communication publique des sciences et technologies. C’est le cas en particulier dans le domaine de la recherche fondamentale, sous-représenté dans notre littérature. L’attitude des scientifiques à propos de l’engagement du public dans le domaine de la physique des particules ont été étudiées dans le cadre du projet de recherche doctorale décrit ci-dessous.

L’étude porte sur la communauté des scientifiques de la collaboration CMS (Solénoïde compact pour muons) au CERN, l’Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, également connu sous le nom de « Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules ». La collaboration CMS exploite un détecteur sur le Grand collisionneur de hadrons (LHC) du CERN, l’accélérateur de particules le plus grand et le plus puissant du monde. Selon le CERN, environ la moitié de la communauté mondiale des physiciens des particules effectue des recherches sur les expériences du CERN.

Les opinions et comportements des scientifiques ont été explorés par le biais d’une approche mixte et pragmatique, sur la base d’une enquête en ligne à l’échelle de la collaboration. Cette enquête a récolté 391 réponses valides. Elle a été suivie de 19 entretiens, choisis par échantillonnage non probabiliste, menés soit en personne, soit par appel vidéo. La majorité des scientifiques qui ont répondu à l’enquête ont exprimé une opinion favorable sur l’engagement public, parfois également appelé « sensibilisation ». Les scientifiques participent à cet engagement public volontairement, considérant même cette participation comme un devoir. Être membre d’une grande collaboration de recherche est considéré comme un avantage pour la participer à la sensibilisation, en partie en raison du sentiment de responsabilité partagée au sein d’un groupe important de chercheurs, permettant également de mettre les ressources en commun et d’engager des professionnels de la communication.

Les actions d’engagement public auxquelles les scientifiques cherchent à participer ont une forte connotation pédagogique. Les paradigmes participatifs - dans lesquels le public est impliqué dans le processus de recherche - sont exclus par la majorité des répondants à l’enquête et des scientifiques interviewés. La pratique de la recherche fondamentale a également été présentée par les personnes interrogées comme une pratique culturelle, ramenant la physique à ses racines dans la « philosophie naturelle ».

La thèse conclut en recommandant que l’évaluation de l’engagement du public dans le domaine des sciences et technologies tienne compte de la « distance de pertinence » relative - le degré de pertinence du domaine de recherche pour la vie humaine quotidienne. Ce critère permettrait de déterminer les modes d’engagement adaptés à un domaine de recherche donné, afin de ne pas traiter les sciences fondamentales comme le seraient les recherches appliquées. Par ailleurs, les recherches sur la science et la société ont démontré qu’il n’existe pas un « public » unique et homogène, mais de nombreux publics qui se définissent en fonction du contexte, de leur intérêt et des niveaux d’expertise. Les études des interactions entre science et société doivent par conséquent considérer l’engagement public (PEST) comme un engagement pluriel du public envers les sciences et les technologies, et éviter de généraliser à l’extrême l’applicabilité des résultats des recherches et des recommandations à une science qui serait unique, monolithique et uniforme.

You can read my thesis in its entirity on the UWE Bristol Research Repository or on the CERN Document Server. Alternatively, and if your brower allows it, you can skim the embedded version below (once all 200+ pages load) – you may have to squint, though!

I pursued my PhD on a part-time, distance-learning basis, and began my studies in . The first three years of my studies were supported by CERN’s doctoral-student programme.

My ORCID is 0000-0002-1628-2618.

Open Science

“The opposite of open is not closed; the opposite of open is broken.” – John Wilbanks

Over the years, I have become an advocate for open science, particularly the use of free/libre and open-source software in research. I have contributed extensively to the CERN Open Data portal, and was involved in the first four releases of open data by CMS.

Interests

In what feels like a previous life, I was trained in Indian classical music 🎶: Carnatic vocals for six years and the tabla for three years. These days, I sing (first bass) with Heartwood Chorus, a community folk choir based in Bristol, and play the cajón with the Broken Biscuits cèilidh band. I’m also teaching myself to play the bass guitar, having treated myself to a gorgeous five-string bass in . Sometimes, I pick up a guitar and strum a few chords, or pretend to play the blues on my harmonica.

I enjoy watching, playing and generally following cricket 🏏. I am the vice-captain of the 6th team of the Bedminster Cricket Club and play occasional games for the Bristol Bushwackers, having previously represented the CERN Cricket Club; I am a right-arm swing bowler, bat right-handed and keep wickets when needed. Occasionally, I play table tennis 🏓 and have also trained a bit in martial arts 🥋 – karate and taekwondo.

I love tinkering with software and hardware, and my laptop runs Kubuntu 🐧. What little coding I do – for work or for myself – mainly involves the 🇷 language, which I learnt for my research. I also have my own personal wiki, but I am not very good about adding content to it.

For many years, I contributed to the Mozilla 🦊 community: I hosted a couple of Mozilla Science Lab global sprints at CERN, started the (now-defunct) Mozilla Study Group at CERN and mentored several projects as part of the Mozilla Open Leaders programme. If you want to learn more, you can read my interview for the StoryEngine project, conducted at MozFest a few years ago.

Contact

I can be found online on several platforms:

Alternatively, feel free to drop me an e-mail to achintya@achintyarao.in. My public-key fingerprint is 3B78 862A 0A60 3D7E 6A8A 1EE1 E76E B15E 4160 0AF4.