Innovations in the Communication of Science
SISSA, Trieste, Italy

The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), founded in 1978, is a centre for research and postgraduate studies leading to a PhD degree. The School is funded by the Ministry for Education, University and Research: about 15 % of its budget comes from research contracts with Italian, European and International Institutions.

Initially concentrated around the so-called "hard sciences", SISSA’s Sectors have recently raised to encompass new highly promising and dynamic fields such as Neuroscience, Structural and Functional Genomics. SISSA has also special relations with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) and with the Synchrotron Laboratory in Trieste.

The same flexibility of its more traditional researches prompted SISSA to an innovative exploration of groundbreaking interfaces between science and the humanities which led to the foundation, in 1986, of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Advanced Studies.

Among the many activities of the Laboratory, a special remark goes to the Master in Science Communication, a two-year part-time course aimed at providing specialised training in different fields of science communication, such as written, radio, television and on-line journalism, institutional and business communication, traditional and multimedia publishing and museology. The students of the Master course produce the online journal Jekyll and, thanks to the co-operation of a local radio station, the radio programme Jekyll on air.

Alongside the didactic activity research on science communication came, which led to the establishment of ICS (Innovations in Science Communication) and to the production of the journal Jcom. Museum studies are a topic both of the Master courses and of the ICS activities.

In 2002 the MSC research group set up the first Italian permanent observatory on scientific communication through the media. It consists of systematic monitoring and analysis of scientific news on television, newspapers and magazines.

Since its official recognition in 1994, the Master in Science Communication trained more than 150 communicators, 90% of whom assert to be currently working in the field of science communication.