A Pioneer in Teaching Scientific Communication Internationally

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

Earlier this month, I attended the 2014 annual conference of the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA). At the conference I gave 2 workshops and led 2 roundtables. One was a luncheon roundtable on AuthorAID.

Giving my sessions left me little time to attend sessions by others. I did, however, attend a presentation by this year’s recipient of a major AMWA award, the Harold Swanberg Distinguished Service Award.

The presentation especially interested me because the recipient, J. Patrick Barron, has spent his career teaching scientific communication internationally. I enjoyed hearing about this work.

Barron was born in Scotland and attended college in the United States. In 1969 he moved to Japan to study Japanese. He soon became active in translating medical articles from Japanese to English, editing articles by Japanese authors, and teaching English.

In 1991, Barron became a professor at Tokyo Medical University. There he founded the International Medical Communications Center, which later became the Department of International Medical Communications. Barron retired last year and is now an adjunct professor at Seoul National University in South Korea.

Guidance from Barron appears on the website Ronbun.jp. This site is available in both English and Japanese.

This website and the AMWA Journal were sources of information for this post. Earlier volumes of this journal are openly accessible. So are handouts from the 2014 AMWA annual conference.

I hope to read handouts from some of the conference sessions that I missed. Maybe the handouts also would interest some of you.

Until the next post—

Barbara