Science Communication

I strongly believe that doing good science is just as important as sharing it with the public. As a science communicator, I experiment with different formats to share scientific knowledge.

Workshops for kids

This is the format I started with as a student at the University of Pavia, demonstrating experiments about the human body at Indiscienza, a student-organized science fair. Later, I came back to this format by organizing workshops for Italian children in Germany with the association Native Scientist, and workshops in German for local children as part of the KinderUni at the University of Cologne.

Talks

I have given talks about my research in many settings, from Skype a Scientist sessions to pub talks, and in different languages, from Italian to German. Below you can find videos of some of the science slams I took part in.
Get in touch if you would like me to speak at your event!

Illustrations

Below you can find a selection of illustrations I have created for different projects, both with traditional media and digitally.
Get in touch if you are interested in a custom commission (graphical abstracts, logos, or visuals for websites and talks).

A digital painting in the style of Van Gogh's Sunflowers: a vase of flowers against a turquoise wall, where every petal is drawn as a mitochondrion with folded inner membranes, some red and some yellow. — Submitted cover art for Kaul et al. 2025

Watercolor Advent wreath drawn as a mitochondrial membrane, with four candles numbered I to IV like the complexes of the electron transport chain, an ATP synthase made of cinnamon sticks and an orange, holly berries marked P, and an electron bauble. Proton (H+) baubles hang above, and “Merry Xmas” is written in the middle. — Electron transport wreath for a mitochondria-themed Christmas postcard

A strip of cartoon orange mitochondria, each acting out a pun on the word: kite-ochondria flying a kite, fight-ochondria boxing, spy-tochondria in a trench coat, night-ochondria as a crescent moon, fright-ochondria screaming in Munch's painting, Zeit-ochondria as a clock, byte-ochondria as binary digits, and many more. — Mitochondria come in different shapes and flavors

Circular poster showing the times of day: a house on a green hill under a sunny sky at the top, mirrored upside down at night below under a moon and stars, with a pale dawn on the left and a pink sunset on the right. — Poster for an activity sorting animals into diurnal, nocturnal and crepuscular species

Watercolor clock drawn as a cell: the rim is a membrane, and the gears are organelles such as a mitochondrion, turned by blue clock hands. — Watercolor reinterpretation of the cellular clock machinery

Video

This was a one-off, but a lot of fun! Together with other science communication enthusiasts from the association Indiscienza, I made a stop-motion video (in Italian) about antibiotic resistance, which won the Italian National Prize for Science Outreach in the category “Short videos”.

© Roberta Colapietro, 2026. All works on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This means you’re welcome to share anything from this page for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit me as the creator and don’t modify it!