Nature Network Looking For Non-North American Non-European Science Bloggers

Nature Network is a networking site for scientists, that includes forums, groups and, of course, blogs. While the scientists who blog there hail from around the globe, the site is dominated by scientists in Boston and London. Not surprisingly, most of the Nature Network bloggers are in North America or Europe.

Matt Brown, one of the editors of Nature Network, has posted that they are looking for science bloggers from Africa, Asia, South America and Central America to provide new perspectives. You can post as frequently as you like, but they would like the blogs to be in English. If you are from one of those regions, it would be great if you chose to join the conversation there.

Here are some of the women currently blogging at Nature Network blogs:

• Jennifer Rohn's Mind the Gap is about "Adventures in the London sci-lit-art scene...and occasionally beyond". Rohn is a post-doc in cell biology at University College London. She's also the founder and editor of LabLit.com magazine.
• Sara Fletcher writes about "daily life at a synchrotron" at A different wavelength. Fletcher is a technical writer and web manager for the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire.
• Toronto biologist Eva Amsen blogs about her (almost completed) PhD, among other things, at Expression Patterns. She writes about the intersection of science, art and daily life at easternblot.
• University of California at Davis Professor of Plant Pathology Pamela Ronald blogs at Tomorrow's Table for Nature as well as her original Tomorrow's Table blog. Ronald is also the director of grass genetics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute.
  
• The Gulf Stream is a blog about environment, natural history and academic culture by developmental neurobiologist Kristi Vogel. Vogel is an Assistant Professor in the department of Cellular and Structural Biology at UT Health Center in San Antonio.
  
• Notes from a small lab is postdoc Joanne Clark's blog about science, life and moving from London to Boston.
• Anna Kushner's blog, Lab Life, have followed her experiences as a graduate student at Harvard to her current position as an intern at the Nature Network offices in Boston.
  
• Deanne Taylor is the program director of the bioinformatics graduate program at Brandeis University, as well as a research scientists in biostatistics at the Harvard NIEHS Center for Environmental Health.
• rENNISance woman is the blog of Cath Ennis, research development facilitator at BC Cancer Research Centre in Vancouver. She also writes about less sciency stuff at VWXYNot.
  

There are a number of other blogs there too, but these are the most recently updated and/or established blogs. As you can see from the list, scientists from the US, UK and Canada are overrepresened, as are life scientists. It would be excellent if a wider diversity of voices joined in the conversation.

If you are interested, read the notice at AuthorAID.

And I suppose this is as good a place as any to plug AuthorAID which is a free program designed to help researchers in developing countries to publish and otherwise communicate their work. They have held a number of workshops in Africa, with the next scheduled for November 12 at The Grassland Society of Southern Africa. Check out their site for resources on how to write papers and make presentations. The AuthorAID blog is written by Barbara Gastel, an associate professor in the Department of Humanities in Medicine at Texas A&M, who specializes in science writing and technical communication.

Tags: blogs, Nature Network, AuthorAID