At Nature Network’s Science Blogging conference last August in London, a call was put out to get senior scientists to start blogging. The aim of this Science Blogging Challenge was to encourage more scientists to engage in this newer form of scientific communication and to help science blogging gain greater visibility and credibility.

And the co-winners of the Challenge are:

Shirley Wu, graduate student, Stanford University

and

Russ Altman, chair of bioengineering, professor of bioengineering, genetics and medicine, Stanford University

Shirley got Russ to start his blog, Building Confidence in September 2008. Shirley is a biomedical informatics PhD student in Russ’s lab and has her own blog, I Was Lost But Now I Live Here.

Russ and Shirley have won invitations and all-expenses paid trips to the invitation-only ‘unconference’ SciFoo 2009 hosted by Google at its headquarters in Mountain View, California and organized by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and O’Reilly Media. Since Russ and Shirley live nearby, NPG will use those funds to help other deserving individuals, such as attendees from developing countries, to attend SciFoo ’09.

One of Russ’s blog posts, One of my first post-genomic moments will also be included in Open Laboratory 2008, an anthology of the best scientific blog posts of 2008.

The challenge was issued and judged by Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge, UK), Cameron Neylon (University of Southampton, UK), Richard P Grant (University of Sydney, Australia) and Timo Hannay (Nature Publishing Group). They judged the candidates based on the frequency and quality of the blog posts, and the seniority of the scientist-blogger.

Congratulations Russ and Shirley. And a big thanks to everyone who got a senior scientist to blog and to those scientists who started blogging. Although only one set of winners could be chosen, the scientific community as a whole benefits from more scientists communicating online. Keep up the good work!