Potential research projects
Supervisors:
Dr Wiebke Ebeling
Email: Wiebke.Ebeling@curtin.edu.au
Professor Steven Tingay
Email: s.tingay@curtin.edu.au
Upcoming projects are usually released by project supervisors during the second half of the year.
Research project suitable at Honours level
Assessing and improving the effectiveness of Science Communication through Social Media in astronomical research
A career in science does not inevitably take place in a lab, and many course lectures are already being delivered remotely via the internet. This general shift towards digital media also affects how we can distribute scientific messages to reach larger audiences which comes with both benefits and challenges.
The Education & Outreach program of the newly funded ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) will make extensive use of Social Media channels to publicise research findings, promote researchers and projects, and to provide mentoring and Professional Development to students, teachers and the public. Given the overwhelming dimensions and connectivity of the internet, however, monitoring and maintaining the quality and truthfulness of the scientific message is extremely hard.
As in all science projects, the student will formulate and test hypotheses, provide a quantitative analysis of the results and discuss:
- the most adequate measures of uptake for different media channels (e.g. Facebook "Like" vs "active users");
- the dynamics and demographics for targeted posting in Social Media;
- guidelines and routines to improve the effectiveness in distributing scientific information (e.g. press releases) while protecting the significance of the underlying message.
The student will be supervised by the CAASTRO Education & Outreach Coordinator, Dr Wiebke Ebeling and CIRA Director, Prof Steven Tingay.
Requirements of the candidate: English, background in science (statistics), familiar with Social Media.
