Ziman Award

The Ziman award will be made for a significant innovative collaborative activity to promote public interaction with science and technology.

This could involve, for example, a forum or discussion community, or an interface with non-academic users. Selection will be based on originality and influence alongside collaboration and / or wider participation.

John Ziman had a distinguished career as a theoretical physicist and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1967. He died in 2005 at the age of 79. His book on the social dimensions of science – Public Knowledge, was published in 1967 and marked the first of a series of influential studies of science as a collective human endeavour. In the mid-1980s he joined the Department of Social and Economic Studies at Imperial College, London and set up the Science Policy Support Group for the Economic and Social Research Council. He was actively involved in a variety of initiatives concerning the social responsibility of science. John Ziman was a key figure in the formation of EASST and was its President from 1983 – 1986. He was an avid promoter of initiatives at the public interface of science and was an eloquent and witty commentator on the popular understanding of science.