Philly is a science town.

In Philadelphia, science is all around us, and the Philadelphia-area Science Writers Association (PaSWA) would like to celebrate that fact at the first Philadelphia Science Festival. We want you to join us in creating a series of short (about 60-seconds or so) videos to introduce people to the scientists in their own neighborhoods.

The Philadelphia region sports world-class research universities, renowned science museums and is a hub for technology-based industry. Engineers, physicians and scientists make up a significant portion of the working population—one in six jobs in the region are related to the life sciences industry, alone. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that the people of the region know much about Philadelphia’s inner nerd. According to a 2005 survey in JAMA: the Journal of the American Medical Association, only 18 percent of Americans, in general, claim to know a scientist.

We’re calling it “Faces of Philadelphia Science”

The videos should record little personal moments of awe and inspiration with the idea that they might awe and inspire someone else, too. The videos should shy away from dry discussions of a given subject’s particular field and, instead, focus on what motivates the subject to work in a particular field.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We plan on hosting these videos on the PaSWA YouTube channel. We invite you to create your own videos meeting our modest requirements and post them on YOUR OWN CHANNEL!

Then, all you need to do is to tell us about your videos, and we’ll link them to our official Faces of Philly Science Playlist. Its that simple.

We hope these videos will generate some buzz for the Festival and demonstrate how many of our friends and neighbors are scientists, engineers or simply fans of science. If you have any questions, email us at paswaadmin@gmail.com