Credit: Photo by Massimo Silvano, Trieste
The Academy of Science for the Developing World (TWAS) gave Dr. K.L. Heong the TWAS Prize for Agriculture, recognizing his pioneering work in ecology and integrating biological and social sciences to promote integrated pest management (IPM), which helped millions of rice farmers reduce their pesticide use and helped to communicate science to the rural poor. He received his prize from the president of TWAS, Professor J. Palis (right in photo), at the 18th TWAS General Meeting held in Trieste, Italy, on 13-14 November 2007. In accepting the prize, he delivered a presentation entitled “Communicating agriculture to rural farmers” urging developing- country scientists to do more than achieving scientific excellence and publishing papers. Click here to read synopsis of his presentation …
TWAS is an autonomous international organization founded in 1983. Its mission is to promote scientific capacity and excellence for sustainable development in the South. The Academy provides research grants to scientists and postgraduate fellows, organizes international scientific meetings, and recognizes scientific achievements with TWAS prizes for agriculture, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and physics. The TWAS prizes consist of a plaque and US$10,000. Dr. Sant Virmani was another IRRI scientist who won the TWAS Prize, in 2000.
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December 17, 2007 at 3:34 pm
KL Heong
Dr Escalada, I am honored to be credited in your blog. And many thanks for starting such an innovative means to communicate. After > 20 years working as biological scientist, it is becoming clear to me that the challenge is to communicate the information we have. This will make the biggest differences, far more than efforts to improve technologies. Narrowing the knowledge gap that exists between what is known and what farmers need to know among the millions will enable farmers to enjoy the fruits of research as well as add value to research outputs. I would encourage all reading this blog to explore innovative ways to reach and motivate farmers for change.
December 17, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Monina Escalada
Dr. Heong, the scientific world is blessed to have a person like you who can straddle the world of deep science and communication. The folly of many scientists is to think that to talk in esoteric terms will uphold the scientist in them. Verify, adapt, and simplify should be the extra steps that scientists need to take. You have done it extremely well. In the previous posts, our topics were on readability measures such as the Fog Index, cloze procedure, Flesch reading ease formula and SMOG. The lessons learned from these readability tests is that to be understood one needs to use short, simple and fewer polysyllabic words. I hope the devcom students who regularly read this blog will learn from the abstract of your paper which has been uploaded under Readings. Many thanks. I hope you visit the blog again.