Being part of the Enhpathy consortium allows me, as well as all the other Enhpathy students, to team up with an artist. The idea is to introduce him/her to our project and participate in the creation of an artistic version of our research. Here, in this blog series I will share my personal progress and experiences on the Enhancer in Art project.
The intriguing combination of Art and Science
In recent years I have heard about many projects that aim to combine science and art. For instance, during my university studies I learned about the ‘dance your PhD‘ competition from the Science journal. For that PhD students record a short video of them dancing their projects. This is not only highly entertaining (i.e., dancing scientists) but also offered an alternative way for me to discover other research projects, I would have probably never heard about otherwise. I was hence thrilled that bringing together art and science is part of the Enhpathy program with the ‘Enhancer in Art’ initiative.
My Expectations
For me there are two main expectations for the Enhancer in Art project:
On the one hand, I am looking forward to learning more about science communication. As a researcher I often find myself being part of a science bubble. Of course, I have many opportunities to present my work, at conferences, meetings, in a publication and so on. Most of these events are however limited to researchers. Yet, we have come a long way from limiting science to a small group of men working on secret projects in their basements. On the contrary, many (non-science involved) people have become more and more interested in knowing about the developments on the forefront of science. We as researchers certainly have the responsibility to communicate our work. I hope that with the EIA I can practice and learn how to talk about my project to non-scientist. This will, without doubt, provide me with a skill, I would largely benefit from in my future career.
On the other hand, I aspire to get attention and excitement for my PhD project from a non-scientific audience. I intend to emphasize the importance of the work we as scientists and as a consortium are doing. I hope that by working together with an artist I will reach a broad audience. After all what better way to convey a message than through art?
Even though the EIA is outside of my normal science comfort zone, I am very excited about getting this part of the project started and hope to soon to be able to give an update on it.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860002. 
