This year’s SciComm Award goes to Prof. Dr. Marco Trujillo, who not only vividly presents his own field of research in social media but also has been managing our Section Plant Physiology and Molecular Biology (SPPMB) online presence for ten years now. He started on Twitter, and after the platform was sold and became X (@MolPlantSci) – joined the trend and created the BlueSky account @molplantsci, where he built up an entire new network. “I am extremely grateful to Marco for his long-standing commitment”, says the speaker of our Section, Prof. Dr. Stefan Rensing. 

Trujillo succeeded in presenting our Section professionally there not only because he reported on our Section’s topics and conferences, but also because he showcased the work and scientific findings of his colleagues and helped bring greater visibility to these topics. Trujillo, a Heisenberg Professor and the former chair of the Plant Physiology Institute at the RWTH University Aachen, who recently accepted a call to the University of Hamburg to establish the department of plant immune biology, would feel uncomfortable putting himself in the spotlight on social media. 

Trujillo advises aspiring researchers “to focus on identifying what is new – and thus what is noteworthy – about a piece of information, and to highlight this at the beginning of the text”. By distilling the core of a message in this way, even complex topics can be presented in short sentences. Presence on social media helps to build one’s own reputation, the molecular biologist thinks. Building an international network of colleagues working o the same topic via social media for example makes it also easier to start conversations at conferences, because you already “know” each other from social media. 

To do this, you don’t have to be a show-off or post cute cat videos. Trujillo also believes that social media is well-suited for staying up to date in one’s own research discipline. The newly Hamburg-based researcher considers that one might also be in contact with reviewers previously. Trujillo analyses how ubiquitin-mediated signalling and proteolysis enable (Arabidopsis) plants to sense, respond to, and maintain homeostasis during infection. This molecular basic research could help advance sustainable agriculture, as the findings may contribute to breed more robust plants in the future. “My own social media presence also allowed me to recommend interesting scientific papers to the students in my lab, including links to original sources”, the researcher adds. Anyone interested can follow the ubiquitin-researcher on BlueSky @trujillolab.bsky.social or visit his website at Hamburg University, which still is in the making.