Prof. Stephen Serjeant

Broadcasting and Public Engagement

BBC

At the Open University we are fortunate to have a unique partnership with the BBC and other broadcasters. We fully fund and co-produce about 30 BBC TV and radio projects every year, commissioning programmes from both independent and in-house suppliers. A broadcast project is much more than simply a TV or radio series. There are leaflets and brochures, telephone help lines, on-line chats, message boards, downloadable images and texts, podcasts, blogs, and many other supporting materials for our series. A major portal for our public engagement is the OpenLearn website. This website covers much of our broadcasting output, including an extensive dedicated section on Science, Maths and Technology, and including free online learning materials for the public.

• 2020-21: Consultant on prime-time BBC2 series Universe.
• 2015-16: Science consultant, BBC4 Jim Al-Khalili series, The Beginning And End of the Universe
• 2009-2014: Lead science consultant for BBC1 series Bang Goes The Theory, leading a team of 12 Science Faculty academics. I was also one of the volunteer cyclists for the Human Power Station special episode of Bang, which was the hardest physical work I've done in my life (harder than running a marathon).
• 2012-2013: Science Consultant, BBC2 series Stargazing Live
• 2012-13: Science consultant, BBC4 Jim Al-Khalili series, Light and Dark

Online and Print Media

I was a consultant for the successful Sixty Second Adventures in Thought series, which spawned many similar series, including: Sixty Second Adventures in Astronomy (funded by our grant from the Science and Technology Facilities Council), Sixty Second Adventures in Microgravity (funded through a grant to my colleages by the UK Space Agency) and Sixty Second Adventures in Collaborative Science (supported by the European Commission Framework Programme Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action under grant agreement number 653477, our ASTERICS project).

I have also blogged very occasionally for OpenLearn and for The Conversation. One of these blog articles somehow ended up in The Independent newspaper (not that I mind, but nothing to do with me).

I also wrote a monthly science quiz for The Times, in its late, great science magazine Eureka, from 2009-2012

Other public engagement

I had a very enjoyable stint in 2019-20 as the President of the Society for Popular Astronomy, arguably the UK's leading organisation for entry-level astronomy for the public.

I am also interested in citizen science, which I have funded through three large European grants so far. Although citizen science can help with public engagement, this is not fundamentally what it is for. Citizen science is not outreach. Rather, it is a form of crowdsourced data mining, invoving the public directly in the processes of scientific discovery. For more details, see the Research tab.

Last update: 6 November 2022