#CelebratingEngagement: In conversation with Victoria Male

Victoria Male is a Senior Lecturer in Reproductive Immunology based in the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College London. In 2022, Victoria won the President's Medal as part of the President's Awards for Excellence in Societal Engagement.

The President’s Medal is awarded to an individual whose engagement activities have been truly outstanding, a criteria Victoria easily fulfilled due to her work spreading accurate and trustworthy information surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant women.

Victoria took time to talk to the Public Engagement team about her valuable work, why engagement is important to her, and how it has influenced her future projects.

Can you give an overview of the public engagement project you ran, which resulted in you being awarded the President’s Medal?

It wasn't so much a project as a way of life for me for about 2 years. I guess it’s still ongoing, but it started in December of 2020, when some claims started to circulate on social media that COVID vaccines would cause female infertility. The specific claim was that the spike protein of the COVID virus was similar enough to a protein in the placenta that the antibodies raised by the vaccine would attack the placenta, causing infertility and miscarriages.

There aren't that many people in the world that study how the immune system interacts with the placenta, but I'm one of those people, so I thought, if I don't stand up and explain why this isn't true, then who will? And so that day I basically just wrote a big thread about it on Twitter. That was actually the day I was supposed to be moving house – I did manage to move house, but I just had to disappear for an hour to deal with it!

I moved into a related area early in 2021, which focused on whether or not it is safe to get vaccinated when you're pregnant. Naturally, people really want to make the right decision for themselves and for their babies. At first there wasn't a lot of information, but there was some, and so I put together what information there was to help people make their decisions. Initially this was all on social media – mainly on Twitter – but I also did some Instagram lives. As I got more and more people following me, I started to get asked to write in newspapers and appear on TV and radio. Ultimately the information I put together informed some policy recommendations, which was great.

Why do you think engagement is important and what do you think are the benefits of this?

I think as well as scientists helping the public, the public also help scientists.

Thinking about the work that I've been doing, people's decisions to get vaccinated or not can have very serious consequences. Particularly in pregnancy we know that COVID can increase the risk that your baby will be stillborn or born preterm, so these are really important decisions that have potentially life or death consequences. By putting out clear information, we can help people to make informed decisions. My work was specifically about vaccination, but all science engagement plays a role here because people who are already engaged are more ready to join in with the kinds of discussions that allow them to make those informed decisions.

But I think as well as scientists helping the public, the public also help scientists. It's really good for us to do engagement work to find out what the public cares about, and we can use that to inform the direction of our research.

What advice would you give your colleagues at Imperial who want to engage more with their audiences?

From my own experience, I would say find something you care about. For me, I always knew that engagement was important and I kind of dabbled in it. I went to schools and did a few bits and bobs, but I never really got into it because I hadn't found an issue that was super important to me. Giving people the information that they needed to make the best decisions for themselves and their babies really motivated me. It’s when I really found my voice as someone who would talk to the public about science, and everything that I did after came from that – a real desire to get the information out.

What are your future engagement plans, now you’ve been recognised with the President’s Medal? 

In many ways my next steps are to do more of the same. The autumn booster campaign has just started and one of the groups who will be offered the booster is pregnant people because of the increased risk to them and their babies if they catch COVID. I'm one of the people who's going to be trying to get the message out about that, mainly on social media. Surprisingly, I would actually say that misinformation is worse than ever, so we're not just trying to get the right information out, we're also trying to fight misinformation.

I'm also taking some of the things that I've learnt from all of the engagement that I've done back into my own research work. Female reproductive health is quite underfunded compared to lots of other areas, particularly for things like periods and endometriosis. But doing this work, I discovered that people care about these issues a lot. The funding landscape doesn't necessarily represent what the general public care about. From having had those conversations, I’m inspired to redouble my efforts and try to run research projects that will give people the answers that they're looking for. Importantly, I want to make sure we communicate those answers back to the people who are interested in the issue in the first place.

Are you interested in nominating a colleague, student or an inspirational partner who has gone above and beyond to support the development of societal engagement at Imperial? Please read our guidance and submit your nomination!