Natália Pasternak Taschner


Natália Pasternak Taschner is the first president of the Instituto Questão de Ciência . She was director of the Brazilian arm of the science festival, Pint of Science, founder of the Cientistas Explicam initiative, and a founding partner of the science dissemination blog Café na Bancada. Taschner is also the publisher of Brazil's first magazine on critical thinking, Revista Questao de Ciencia.

Education and career

Taschner entered the University of São Paulo in 1998. She completed her BSc, majoring in biology, in 2001. She then enrolled in the university's microbiology PhD programme.
Taschner earned her PhD in microbiology in 2006 from the Institute of Biosciences of the University of São Paulo, with a thesis entitled The regulation of alkaline phosphatase by the sigma factor S of RNA polymerase from Escherichia coli. From 2007 to 2013 she completed a post-doctorate in microbiology, in the field of molecular genetics of bacteria at the University of São Paulo.
Taschner founded the science blog Café na Bancada, with the mission statement: "Difundir a ciência com café!". The website is defunct but continues as a blog, started in 2015, on Facebook. Taschner became director of the Brazilian arm of Pint of Science from 2015 to 2019, in which she coordinated scientific lectures in bars in more than 50 cities in Brazil. As of 2020, Pint of Science was being managed by Luis Gustavo Almeida.
In 2018 she became the first president of the Instituto Questão de Ciência, an organisation focused on the defense of scientific evidence used in public policies. Taschner went as far as to invest her own money into the formation of the IQC, making her the second philanthropist in Brazil to invest private money in science communication. IQC is a co-organizer, along with Aspen's Office for Science and Society, of the 2020 "Aspen Global Congress on Scientific Thinking and Action" in Rome.
Early in 2020 Taschner organised the first specialization course in the public communication of science in the city of São Paulo. The course aims to train journalists and other communication professional about the dissemination of science.

Activities

Taschner has been involved in many activities related to the promotion of science, and attended several conferences and seminars including:
Most media relating to Taschner can be found on the IQC website. In 2020 Taschner co-authored an article with Carlos Orsi for Skeptical Inquirer entitled "Believing" In Science Is Not "Understanding" The Science: Brazilian Surveys.
Taschner appeared in the journal Skeptic in 2018 with an article entitled "Brazilian Cancer Quackery".
Taschner has been interviewed on several occasions, including:
Taschner has lectures at Casa do Saber on "What is Science and why trust it?", "Brazilian Science: Unknown to Brazilians" and the anti-vax movement.
Several of Taschner's lectures and presentations are available on YouTube, including:

Journals

Taschner has published several journal articles, including:
Taschner authored chapter 18 of volume 2 of the book:
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