When they asked me to collaborate with this blog I asked what they expected from me to write about. The answer was very simple:  “write about your field of expertise”. So here I am, ready to tell you quite a few things about… YEAST!!! Yes, you have read it right: Yeast.  But don’t worry; this is still a blog about Science, not a baking one. And I won’t talk just about yeast, but also about other research done in the field I work in now (cancer) and can be interesting for you.

I was an English major in college, and then an English teacher. It was a pretty straight forward path that I followed. Working in the field of science had never seemed a career option until a class in psycholinguistics sparked my curiosity. Many of us have experiences learning new languages.

The question of women’s role in science has been high on the agenda in the past few years and, as a woman in science, it’s something I have taken a great interest in.

Hongik Ingan is the founding national philosophy in Korea; it literally means “devotion to the universal welfare of mankind”. I grew up under these cultural ideals and this is why I always think about how I can give the world a positive influence as a Plant Scientist.

A couple of years ago my son was invited to a party by a friend from his preschool.  This party fell in a particularly inconvenient week for me.  I had a grant due, several papers on my desk that needed editing, some teaching to prepare for, and we were seeing research patients at night.

I was inspired to want to become a scientist when I was just 10 years old, and I knew from then on that I’d never be satisfied if I didn’t at least try. It all began with a school project about water, we covered many different topics from water safety to animals that live in the water. One afternoon a guy who I think worked for the national rivers authority, but it was too long ago now to remember, came to my school and talked about how they assess the health of rivers, about how you know if a river or stream is clean and if the ecosystem in it is healthy.

When I was a college undergraduate, I took a class in human behavioral biology team-taught by two male professors. Most of what I learned really bothered me – it seemed reductionist to claim that males behaved one way and females another based entirely on reproductive goals. The tongue in cheek style, the ease with which other animals were compared to humans, agitated my righteous feminist mind.

Science communicators worldwide work to open up public access to science and to provide a sphere for scientific debate through varied media such as science journalism, science blogs, exhibitions, education and outreach programmes among many others – but what really is science communication and why does it matter?