I’m back, with a big announcement: next week I’ll be curating the @realscientists Twitter account!

@realscientists is a rotating-curator account, which means that every week, a different person takes over the account to post about their work and life and anything else of interest to Twitter. Some weeks they have a traditional academic scientist posting. Other times it’s a journalist, author, policy maker, an industry scientist, or anyone else who is involved with science.

Tweeting for @realscientists is kind of a big deal: the account has more than 35 thousand followers! I’ve wanted to do this for a couple years, though I didn’t apply until just recently… for reasons that seem kind of silly now. As luck would have it, the original curator for next week had to cancel, so I get to step in at the last minute. Props to the Real Scientists mods for getting everything ready in about 3 days.

I’m really glad I got the chance to do this before leaving China. As far as I can tell, there’s never been a Real Scientists curator from China before — probably not surprising, since Twitter is blocked by the national firewall. It’ll be a chance to share a sector of science (and life) that most people don’t get to see. So go follow @realscientists and join me on Twitter this coming week!