Every year, the Swedish Veterinary Agency (SVA) highlights the importance of making scientific information accessible to society by awarding the Science Communicator of the Year prize. In 2024, this recognition was given to climate and tick researcher Anna Omazic, a participant in IDAlert, for her outstanding work in science communication. Omazic played a key role in launching Report Tick, a citizen science web tool designed to monitor ticks and provide early warning signals.
Over the past two years, the Rapportera Fästing platform has collected more than 25,000 tick images with the help of the public. Between 2023 and 2024, Anna Omazic has appeared in the media 475 times, many of those on radio and television.
Read the interview with Anna Omazic by SVA
Are you an extroverted person who likes to be in the spotlight?
– No, not at all! It’s a role I take on to advance our research.
What’s your trick to reaching people?
– Haha, mainly, I think it’s the ticks themselves that get attention! They are tiny creatures that many people find unsettling, and there is fear of tick-borne diseases. Many people have been affected or know someone who has.
Additionally, many people want to contribute to research in this field, which is incredibly valuable for those of us working with citizen science. Thank you for the 25,000 images submitted so far! For us, it’s essential to seize every opportunity to reach our target audience—in our case, the entire Swedish population!
A third key factor is that we have made new discoveries and have been able to share this knowledge with the public. For many, this provides a meaningful reason to spend a few minutes contributing.
What inspires you?
– The evolving collaboration. Discussing and working with fellow researchers at SVA and beyond, both in Sweden and internationally, is incredibly rewarding. One of my roles is to speak with the media, but I always have a team behind me contributing their expertise. It’s our collective knowledge that makes it easy for me to communicate on radio and TV.
Who is Anna Omazic?
– I am an animal science agronomist and started my research career after earning my PhD in animal science. I then worked as a research and education coordinator at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) for a few years.
I was fortunate to be part of an international project at SVA, studying how environmental and climate changes can influence the spread of infectious diseases. This included tick-borne diseases affecting both animals and humans.
In addition to researching ticks and the pathogens they carry, I also work on climate adaptation in reindeer husbandry and infectious eye diseases in reindeer. Another area of my research is One Health, where we examine the interconnectedness of animal health, human health, and ecosystem health.
Do you have any advice for other researchers?
– If you’re doing a two-minute radio interview, my advice is to request the questions in advance. That way, you can prepare a concise and informative response. It’s also better to say you don’t have an answer and briefly explain why, referring to a colleague, rather than trying to answer vaguely and risk being misunderstood.
Thanks for the advice, and congratulations again!
For more information about ticks, you can follow the “FästBloggen” blog (in Swedish): https://www.sva.se/fastbloggen/
