Silje Mæland

Communication has been a priority task for me from day one of my Ph.d. run. I was lucky to be researching a topic of great public interest – sickness absence. In addition, I had supervisors with a basic attitude that we never said no to inquiries from the media. I was challenged early on in communication and encouraged to apply for participation in the Forsker Grand Prix.

Dissemination is, for me, one of the most important societal tasks as a researcher. As a privileged researcher with externally funded research funds, I have always made sure to communicate in several forums. These have been lectures for administration, associations, the general public, at events at Litteraturhus, on radio and on TV. In addition to communicating to students and colleagues, popular science communication has become my core competence and I am often asked by faculty management and the communications department at UiB to contribute.

The Faculty of Medicine has annual reports on academic staff's communication in traditional media. I was employed as an associate professor at UiB in 2019 (50%) and from 2020 in a 100% position. Already in 2020, I was on the list of those who appeased the most at the faculty. In 2020, I was 24 times in the media for UiB and was ranked as the 17th best in the medical faculty. In 2021, I was in the media 61 times and climbed with it to 11th place. The medical faculty has around 1,200 employees, around 1,900 students and, with its over 500 PhD candidates, is one of the biggest contributors to research education at the University of Bergen.

To illustrate this, I will highlight my role as project manager and communicator of research results in the project Bergen I Endring – COVID-19. This project was created in record time in March/April 2020. I built a project group that was made up of researchers and bureaucrats: Two faculties at UiB (the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Psychology), FHI, Helse Bergen HF, Bergen Municipality and Vestland County Municipality. Without the ability to communicate clearly and well, I don't think we would have been able to build this group from a home office at the start of a pandemic. No one in the team had worked together before and we were completely dependent on a project manager who could convey clearly and clearly what we were to do together and what the individual was responsible for. Already on 16 April 2020, before we sent out the first invitation to participate in the research project to 80,000 Bergen residents, I was on Vestlandsrevyen to appease the purpose and importance of this project.

District news Vestlandsrevyen - 16 April 2020 at 19:45 – NRK TV

Many media reports then followed as a direct consequence of conditions in the REK approval. With a project with a broad purpose, we were required to communicate findings to the general public in an efficient manner. This resulted in a project page where we published all new information in the project so that the public and our participants could follow along. Here we also published all the media reports the project generated and it was mostly me as project manager who disseminated information and results from the project in På Høyden, in Bergensavisen, BT, TV2, forskning.no, NRK Hordaland today. Aftenposten, NRK, BT Magasinet etc.

News stories about the BIE study | Department of Global Health and Community Medicine | UiB

When the Pandemic Center was officially opened in October 2020, I helped convey experiences and preliminary results from the project to Minister of Research and Higher Education Henrik Aasheim

Pandemic center opened at UiB | The Faculty of Medicine | UiB

In 2014 I received an award for outstanding teaching at the University of Bergen and in 2020 I was awarded the status of distinguished lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine UiB. These awards are also partly about the ability to communicate even to our students and colleagues.