News & Updates

k. This Sunday, my friend Kristen and I will start a drive from New England that should take about two days to move me to Houston, Texas. Last week I let the Science Festival Alliance member base know via email that I was leaving my post, but this is a way for me to inform all of you that I'll be transitioning from the role as well. For the past six years I've been the Coordinator of the Science Festival Alliance and going forward I'll be a Science Engagement Specialist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in the ARES division. You can email me if you want to learn more or stay in touch, but I wanted to take a minute to thank everyone for personally enriching my life and my career during my time at the SFA. I was cleaning out my laptop and found what amounts to a dragon's hoard of photos about my time with the network and I think that's maybe a better goodbye than a bunch of words are.

Another year is in the books for the Science Events Summit and from the perspective of an organizer it felt like our best year ever. In a moment of reflection on the conference, some things that I wanted to point out to everyone surfaced and I hope you take some time to read over this little love note to the participants, vendors, and attendees that made this meeting so incredible. First, this year we started with a theme instead of adding one at the end.

I could joke and say this post is long overdue but that makes me cringe because while true, it took so much to get to this point and I am so proud of the results that the wait was worth it. Traditionally we collect the yearly annual report data from our members in the fall/winter of the year we are reporting on so around November of last year, many of you were eagerly looking to us and asking where the annual report was so that you could upload your data before retiring onto holiday vacation. When we said it would be a little longer you patiently waited, and when another month came and went you were still patient but growing curious about what exactly we had in store.

Every year the Science Festival Alliance puts together an annual report of activity. The combined numbers for SFA member festivals really add up! (The 2017 report will be available in mid-February). This year we dabbled a bit with collecting annual report information on public science events writ large. To do so, we asked a small core of public science event producers and researchers to share what they could about any activities or findings related to in-person public science events.

The 2018 Science Events Summit is set!