Filippo Nicolini

Filippo Nicolini

PhD student dealing (struggling) with bivalve and arthropod comparative genomics 🧬🦪🦗

Outreach

Last updated: Apr 29, 2024

While I'm not a very chatty person in my everyday life, one of the activity that I prefer the most is reaching out to people and talk about evolution and biology. The expression people have when they are enjoying science is definetely priceless!

That is the reason why in 2017 I engaged with BioPills, an Italian science-communication project that wants to communicate the beauty of life sciences in an effective mannner but without forgetting factual accuracy. At the moment, I am the chief editor of the "Environment and Nature" section of the website. I am also in charge of organizing hikings in different Italian natural settings, in order to let people escape from the urban routine while directly immersing themselves in field-based learning of biology.

Unfortunatly, the website is currently only in Italian, but if you are interested in learning more about it, don't esistate to get in touch!

biopills

1. Web articles

One of the main activity I’ve been carrying out with BioPills is the writing and publication of outreach articles on our website. Over the years, I dealt with many subjects, ranging from zoology to ecology, and from book reviews to interviews. You can find all the articles I published by visiting my account page on BioPills.

Here is a collection of some of them:

2. Webinars

With BioPills I also collaborated in organizing live webinars dealing with various biological topics. My main role was to moderate the webinar, by introducing the speaker and the topic, and by reading questions from the audience. You can find all the webinars hosted by BioPills on the YouTube channel.

Here is the collection of the webinars I moderated:

3. Other activities

Every now and then I also partecipate in side activities which involve the collaboration between BioPills and other scientific initiatives.

For example, following SMBE 2023 in Ferrara, Italy, I established a collaboration with “In the Light of Evolution“ (LoE), a scientific outreach project by the Swiss Bionformatic Institute, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the University of Lausanne. Specifically, the objective was to translate the LoE website into Italian (take a look at the “Banana split story”) and hopefully to jointly organize outreach activities.

Also, for over 2 years BioPills has provided articles to the “Giornale dei Biologi” on a monthly basis. I took care of reviewing articles dealing with zoology, ecology and related articles, and I also wrote my own piece: “Abbiamo ancora bisogno di parlare di fossili viventi?” (which may translate in something like “Is there any use in discussing the living fossil concept?”).