Hunter Hines, a PhD student supervised by Dr Genoveva Esteban in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences (SciTech), has had a piece published by the prestigious journal Nature. Hines is the first author on an article about using social media in microbiology outreach at a global scale. Hunter’s Instagram account @microbialecology currently has 55,000 followers. At the end of 2018 his account received over 1.4 million views in a single week. Around this time this also went viral being picked up by ~30 international media outlets, including National Geographic (Russia). The Nature piece published this week can be read here: doi:10.1038/d41586-019-00493-3
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00493-3
Hunter’s Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/microbialecology
NatGeo Russia: http://www.nat-geo.ru/nature/1249648-snyato-cherez-mikroskop-ili-chto-proiskhodit-v-kaple-vody/
Hunter’s PhD research is on the global distribution of the single-celled organisms known as protists.