Wednesday Nite @ The Lab: Sharing the sagas of science and scientists

摘要

Wednesday Nite @ The Lab, now in its 12 year, is a public science series offered every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, starting at 7pm at the Genetics Biotechnology Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Additional partners include the University of Wisconsin-Extension and the Wisconsin Alumni Association. The series is intended to be a regular, routine, and reliable program that welcomes lifelong learners to come to campus to develop their science savvy. The series also provides researchers with a venue for honing their talents in sharing their science and in engaging the public. Since February 2006, the series has hosted over 500 different presenters from the full range of sciences. The live audience averages 50 people, most of whom are active retirees with college degrees. The series is also streamed in high-definition both live and in archive at http://www.biotech.wisc.edu/webcams. Many presentations are also recorded by Wisconsin Public Television for later viewing on WPT's University Place series and on the website wpt.org/universityplace. Presentations run 52-55 minutes. Presentations are followed by an open-ended session of questions and answers. In addition, many participants then chat one-on-one with presenters in a “Linger at the Lectern” session. The series provides a model for a regularly-scheduled series held in one place that welcomes the public to campus to experience science as exploring the unknown. The series runs on in-kind resources; it has no cash budget. It is a model that may be adaptable to other universities with a large number of researchers.