Celebrating Brian Trench’s contribution to science communication

A lifetime shaping science communication

By Declan Fahy

Academic fields, professional networks and degree programmes don’t just appear. They are created by people, shaped by people and sustained by people.

Brian Trench, who recently turned 81, has been one of those key people in science communication.

Well known to researchers in the field around the world as a former president of PCST, from 2014 to 2021, he has made significant contributions to the development of science communication as a field of research and practice, and to the formal institutions that support it.

An Irishman whose mother, Bea Orpen, was a notable landscape painter, Brian can be considered part of the first wave of academics who formalised science communication as an academic field at the end of the twentieth century. It was a time when the relationship between science and society needed fresh scholarly examination. Novel degrees, new networks and state-of-the-art journals were born.

I first met him in the mid-1990s as an undergraduate journalism student at Dublin City University. I had a passion for science journalism and popular science writing. He had reported on science and technology during a long and distinguished career in Irish journalism.

He was running a just-launched master’s degree in something I had never heard of before, a novel subject called “Science Communication”. It was new, exciting and relevant to all the science-related problems in the world. I was immediately hooked.

The degree focused on communication and on science and society, with teaching by scholars in communication studies, psychology, philosophy, history, journalism and the natural sciences. There was a sense of different types of knowledge combining in new and important ways. Brian could see the connections between these different forms of knowledge, and he has always liked to work in those interesting spaces where fields meet, as reflected in his writing on the interdisciplinarity of science communication.

Brian has contributed to the development of global networks in science communication. He is a life member of the PCST Network, where he served as a member of the Scientific Committee for 14 years. Researchers and practitioners will have their own stories and memories of his presence at many PCST conferences, giving papers, organising workshops and offering advice, support and mentorship to so many of us.

He has also contributed to the field’s growing body of knowledge through his scholarship. He has made important contributions to science journalism, especially in examining changes to the specialism in the digital era and capturing those changes as they were occurring, quite a difficult task for a scholar.

He has made significant contributions to our understanding of models of science communication, one of the field’s essential guiding concepts, and his work in this area continues to be a cornerstone of much reflection on the topic.

As well as his original scholarship, he has shaped the field through his significant body of work as an editor, helping to establish some of the intellectual infrastructure of science communication.

In this work, he has collaborated closely with his good friend Massimiano Bucchi at the University of Trento. Their collaborations have resulted in three editions of the Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, a central resource for the field, and their 2025 book Science Communication: The Basics, a strong primer for new entrants to the field and a synthesis of core ideas for established scholars.

Personally, I have valued most their edited four-volume anthology, The Public Communication of Science. In this major intellectual contribution to the field, they selected and assembled 79 central readings in science communication that provide foundational insights that might otherwise remain scattered across disparate books and journals. Their introduction to the anthology said the readings “present theories whose validity should be tested in the face of recent transformations but also concepts that need to be radically rethought”. It remains a continual source of ideas and inspiration for me, and no doubt for many others.

This work of identifying and categorising core concepts in the field has been a theme of Brian and Massimiano’s work, visible most recently at the end of Science Communication: The Basics, where they outline “A Short Lexicon of Science Communication”, describing key terms and concepts.

Brian and Massimiano have also published reflections on the development and status of science communication as an academic discipline, demonstrating its conceptual advances as well as areas that continue to be sources of significant theoretical weakness in our field. Brian has also reflected on the status of science communication as a “vital and vulnerable” university subject. He has been aware that healthy fields need sympathetic but honest introspection. It’s a good habit for all of us.

I will be working with Brian and colleagues on a new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology. It will be an honour for me. When I talk to him now about science communication, it is as stimulating as it was when we first spoke some 30 years ago about this exciting new field.