I am a postgraduate fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology in London where I am spending three months researching a briefing paper on science diplomacy. This POSTnote will give members of the UK Parliament an overview of the topic, including current interpretations of science diplomacy, the goals of national and international organisations that practise science diplomacy and a number of case studies.

POSTnotes are four page summaries of public policy issues based on reviews of the research literature and interviews with stakeholders from across academia, industry, government and the third sector; they are peer reviewed by external experts.

I am an AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral student with the University of Leicester and the British Library in the UK. My PhD research is using oral history to explore how privatisation policies of the 1980s and 1990s affected government research laboratories and the scientists who worked in them. This follows on from the British Library’s wider project in which more than 100 British scientists were interviewed for An Oral History of British Science. As part of my research I will be conducting 20 life story interviews with scientists and civil servants who experienced these changes; the completed recordings will be deposited for future use in the British Library Sound Archive.