The Times Higher Education publication has this week generously given the LSE Impact Conference another mention… along with one of the star speakers Professor Stephen Curry.

In the ‘weekly transmissions from the blogosphere’ section, Professor Curry’s presentation at the Conference on Innovative Methods for Impact and Engagement is referenced.

Podcasts, presentations, photos and Twitter results all taken from the LSE Impact Conference in June 2011 are available to download and use for free via our Impact Conference 2011 tab.

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Some see blogging as a pastime for “spotty, girlfriendless young men banging away at their keyboards”, but could it be used as a demonstration of research impact?

Stephen Curry, professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, believes it could. Writing on his Reciprocal Space blog (http://bit.ly/kyufI0), part of the Occam’s Typewriter blogging community of scientists, he highlights the increasing pressure on academics to convince funders of the “impact” of their research.

Professor Curry recently gave a speech at the London School of Economics during a conference called Investigating Academic Impact. An audio recording of his speech, “Innovative Methods for Impact and Engagement”, is provided on his blog. It centred on a particular aspect of a grant application, a section called “Outline of public engagement plans”.

Professor Curry said: “I had a slight guilty conscience that I wasn’t fulfilling my duty to the taxpayer by engaging more actively with the public about the science I did using their money.

“In about 2007-08, I gradually became aware of the scientific blogosphere, and it did strike me that starting a scientific blog might be a good way of fulfilling this duty.”

The article can be read in full at THE.