Tim Radford's giving the keynote address at the Science Communication Conference in May

In three months it'll be the British Science Association's Science Communication Conference and when I looked at the programme...

"I decided to pre-blog some of the conference sessions at the (25-26th) May 2011 Science Communication Conference because every time I read one of the session blurbs I thought "that would be interesting to blog about". I've previously blogged on my interest in public engagement and online public engagement, the latter being the theme of this conference."

Session on #libelreform at the Science Communication Conference

Today I got an email from the nice people at the British Science Association telling me (and lots of other people too) that the keynote address at the 10am conference plenary is to be given by Tim Radford.

"We are delighted to announce that freelance journalist and former science editor of the Guardian Tim Radford will give this year’s Science Communication Conference keynote address.

Tim worked for the Guardian for 32 years - becoming among other things - letters editor, arts editor, literary editor and science editor and has written for the Lancet and New Scientist, winning the Association of British Science Writers award for science writer of the year four times. He regularly takes part in discussions about science and media across the world and has even found time to write a book - The Crisis of Life on Earth.

Join us to hear about Tim’s extraordinary career and his experience of engaging the public with science and thoughts on how new media is affecting the future of science communication."

In January 2011 Tim published, in the Guardian, his "25 commandments for journalists" - some of them I'd heard before during my course on science communication. As is usual for commandments they were handed down from tutors to students and shared widely - and, naturally, argued about by the Guardian commentariat. As you can see from a search of the tweets mentioning it, the article was retweeted quite a bit.

Tim also contributed to one of Ed Yong's epic threads on his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog - Ed asked his readers to tell the story of how they got into science writing and Tim's response is the third comment on the blog.

Other posts that I wrote on this topic, I'm probably going to blog about most of the sessions between now and May:

• SciCommConf post #4: (this post)
• SciCommConf post #3: Session on #libelreform at the Science Communication Conference
• SciCommConf post #2: Science Communication conference in May: info about bursary (and application form)
• SciCommConf post #1: The science communication conference, public engagement and what I'm doing on the CHI+MED project
  CHI+MED is a 6yr, EPSRC-funded (£5.7m) project grant, on making interactive medical devices safer - I'm the co-ordinator of some of our public engagement activities.

Further reading:

• A manifesto for the simple scribe - my 25 commandments for journalists by Tim Radford in the Guardian's blog
• On the Origin of Science Writers by Ed Young, Not Exactly Rocket Science blog