Bring a Scientist to School Day

Jessica Adkins, staff writer

Careers in science are becoming increasingly relevant as society becomes more science focused. The need for medicine is always growing asmore new medications are being discovered. However, scientists do not just create a medicine and go with it from first results; they often have other scientists reproduce their work to see if there were any errors or any ways to make them better.

On Wednesday, Sept. 19, Tim Errington gave a presentation as part of the Science Career Talks program at PVCC. His job focuses on reproducible research science. He works for a company called Center for Open Science.

What they do is take what lab researchers have produced and see if they can get the same results. There is one twist though. Errington mentioned that most lab workers do not publicly give out their findings of work because there could be room for errors.

The goal of scientists at the Center for Open Science is to allow public access to all research projects that happen beyond the outer walls. All research that is done at Center for Open Science is “MetaScience Research,” said Errington.

Metascience is science that focuses on the use of the scientific methods to gain results from research. One thing that the Center for Open Science does is they always send their research results to other scientists so they can get approval for the plan of how their paperwork will be set up. The Center for Open Science developed a “Kindergartener’s Guide to Improving Research” shared by Errington.

He said the rules for improving research are “show your work and share.”

PVCC is trying to get the program for Science Career Talks started by hosting a monthly series in which they bring in scientists that are either local or regional and have them talk to those who are interested in certain science career fields.