Ali Bailey
Director of Communications and Public Engagement , The Francis Crick Institute
Ali Bailey is director of communications and public engagement at the Francis Crick Institute in London, the largest biomedical research laboratory under a single roof in Europe. Ali leads a team of 32 people working to involve and engage a wide variety of audiences in the Crick’s mission to discover how life works. Before joining the Crick in April 2022, Ali was director of communications and public engagement at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. This was the culmination of a 16-year career in healthcare where she led a number of teams as director of communications in university hospitals in the UK.
Ali’s early career training was in science communications and after graduating she worked as a science producer at the BBC. She created features and returning series about science and medicine for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. Ali studied Biological Sciences and the History and Philosophy of Science at Jesus College, Oxford, and has recently completed a part-time masters degree in social innovation at the Judge Business School in Cambridge.
Sessions
The Story of Science: Valuing Specialist Communications in a Technical World
Stories matter in science. They are often thought of in relation to mainstream media telling the public about important advances being made in laboratories. However, they also matter to science itself – and increasingly so now that interdisciplinarity is so critical at the frontiers of new knowledge. Communicating science is a critical craft that requires practise and training over many years. Professional communicators in science organisations are critical to both the success of their employers and the wider engagement of the public in science and its issues. But how is the relationship between science and the media evolving and what does this mean for science story-telling and the potential of multimedia content production in communications teams?