Speaker
Description
Communicating Science: From Individual Skill to Center Culture - Erik Lindahl
Science and Technology Centers are created to pursue ambitious research that no single laboratory could accomplish alone. But their impact depends on more than discovery: it depends on whether students, faculty, partners, policymakers, and the public can understand why that discovery matters. and a challenge: Scientists remain among the most trusted groups in American society: 77% of U.S. adults express confidence that we act in the public interest. Yet in the same survey, only 45% described us as good communicators. The public is not rejecting science; but they are waiting for scientists to communicate more clearly, concretely, and openly.
Drawing on a seminar developed for the NSF Center for Quantitative Cell Biology, this talk presents practical, low-overhead ways centers can build a culture of scientific storytelling. Our trainees arrive with increasingly diverse educational, linguistic, and cultural experiences. That diversity is an extraordinary strength; but access to the tacit conventions of scientific presentation remains uneven. Rather than assuming students will somehow acquire those conventions, we can make them explicit, teachable, and enjoyable. We will share techniques we use to help students transform linear data dumps into audience-centered narratives that are unexpected, concrete, and memorable, with applications to posters, elevator pitches, scientific talks, job interviews, and public outreach. In addition, while we were originally doing this for the students, we have realized that having open discussions about how we present our work helps create a strong center team spirit that is equally beneficial to faculty - because the students are far more experienced than we are e.g. when it comes to the fast pace of modern communication channels. The same principles apply at the institutional level: centers must do more than generate knowledge and lament that it is misunderstood. We must participate actively in the public conversation: explaining uncertainty honestly, connecting discoveries to people’s lives, and listening as well as speaking. Our goal is not merely to produce better presentations. It is to help trainees become confident ambassadors for science, enable faculty to advocate more effectively for their work, and ensure that the discoveries emerging from our centers become stories that others can understand, remember, and act upon.