Simon Clews

Now an Honorary (Senior Fellow) with the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Simon Clews was the inaugural Director of the Melbourne Engagement Lab at Melbourne University. Here he trained, encouraged and motivated some of Australia’s brightest minds to make their work accessible to non-academic audiences.

Simon also loves a good competition and is very active both nationally and internationally in the Three Minute Thesis and Visualise Your Thesis competitions, both highly successful examples of academic research being communicated in interesting, accessible and engaging ways.

Simon also works with writers and academics around the world to help them improve their writing and communication skills and develop their careers as providers of creative, well-written non-fiction for a commercial market. As well as teaching in numerous universities around Australia, he is a regular trainer/professional development provider in Canada, Singapore, the UK, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Prior to setting up the Melbourne Engagement Lab, Simon took the fledgling Melbourne Writers’ Festival and over fourteen years placed it firmly on the world stage. He was also Creative Program Director for Melbourne’s Reader’s Feast bookstore producing numerous iterations of Crime & Justice, the History Writers Festival, Writers on Collins, Writers at the Convent and Writers at Como. Simon was also responsible for programming Stories Alive, a large-scale celebration of writing for children at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall.

Over the years Simon has been a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines (including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, and the Herald Sun) and once even took his highly honed retail skills and ventured into the world of guidebooks with Let’s Go Shopping, a tongue-in-cheek international mail order shopping directory.

Simon is the author of Your Time Starts Now! - a guide to achieving success in the Three Minute Thesis competition (Thesis Whisperer Books) and The New Academic - how to write, present and profile your amazing research to the world (NewSouth Books).

For more information visit www.simonclews.com.