BLACKSBURG, Va., Nov. 24, 2015 – Virginia Tech students recently learned that a well-written scientific abstract is helpful, but a good elevator speech can be more important for acquiring support for research projects.
Graduate students — from the departments of fish and wildlife conservation, biological sciences, entomology, and more — practiced talking about their research with experts from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.
The Global Change Center at Virginia Tech partnered with one of its faculty affiliates, Dana Hawley, an associate professor in biological sciences in the College of Science, to sponsor the workshop.
The students — the majority of whom are affiliated with the Interfaces of Global Change interdisciplinary graduate education program at Virginia Tech — learned ways to better connect with their audience through improvisational acting and exercises dedicated to distilling the message of their research.
For one exercise, the center’s staff brought in three nonscientists to try to understand the meaning of an abstract written for a scientific audience.
The abstract, which detailed research on the dirt-eating behaviors of lemurs in Madagascar, was written by Brandon Semel of McHenry, Illinois, a Ph.D. student studying fish and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment.
Graduate student Carl Wepking of Lancaster, Wisconsin, a Ph.D. student in biological sciences, read the abstract to the workshop attendees and attempted to distill the message of the research for the non-scientists. The difference in the nonscientists’ understanding post-translation was significant.
“Having the scientific abstract translated into everyday language made a huge difference in my ability to fully grasp the depth and importance of Brandon’s research,” said Michael Stowe, the communications director for Virginia Tech News and one of the nonscientists. “One of the most rewarding aspects of my job as a university communicator is promoting the faculty’s world class research. To reach a broad audience, it’s vital to explain and tell the story behind the research without getting caught up in scientific jargon.”
Semel said that he learned a lot from watching his abstract translated from a piece for a scientific audience to one for a general audience.
“I found the Alan Alda workshop to be a very valuable experience,” Semel said. “Having worked in science for so long, it’s easy to lose touch with how foreign some of the concepts and jargon I use are to people who don’t use them on a daily basis. Even among fellow scientists, the words I use to talk about the lemurs that I study may be totally foreign. It’s one thing to discuss ‘prosimian geophagy’ among colleagues, but using common terms like ‘lemur dirt-eating’ makes my work much more interesting to those who don’t study primates. It’s all a matter of knowing your audience.”
In other workshop exercises, graduate students practiced using hand gestures and metaphors to better explain their research and perfected their ‘elevator speeches’, which one student describes in a blog post.
“Because science is complicated and labor intensive, it’s easy for scientists to get carried away with wanting to include many details upfront rather than getting to the punchline,” writes Jen Wagner of New City, New York, a Ph.D. student in fish and wildlife conservation. “But science communication is not about rambling about every detail of your research; it is about being able to connect with someone and create a conversation.”
Training scientists in the skills necessary for science communication is a central aim of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech, the Graduate School at Virginia Tech, and the university. Virginia Tech offers a graduate-level class in Communicating Science that has been popular among students and is modeled on the work of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Graduate students of any major may take the class.
October was the sixth month in a row of the warmest temperatures ever recorded. That’s according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And El Nino is not fully to blame. Greenhouse gas emissions are a big part of the problem. Researchers at Virginia Tech and Sweet Briar College are working on ways to remove more of it from the air.
Here’s how Thomas O’Halloran explains the difference between weather and climate: “The weather tells you what you need to wear today and climate tells you what should be in your closet.”
O’Halloran is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of environmental resources and conservation at Virginia Tech. A self-described weather geek, his team is measuring not only short term fluctuations, but also creating long term models with the data. He designed and built a brand new observation tower, perched 60 feet above the tree tops near the Blue Ridge Mountains that is gathering information 24/7 in the middle of a loblolly pine forest planted 25 years ago.
“A pine plantation is a managed eco-system. It’s the kind of thing, in the context of climate, if we want to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it into forests, it might be advisable to expand the forested area and plant more trees. So part of our research is asking the question, what kinds of vegetation, trees or forests are most beneficial to climate?” The question needs answering before policy decisions can be made on the worldwide effort to combat global warming.
“So the scientific community has set this goal of 2 degrees Celsius of warming; we’ve said if we can limit climate warming to 2 degrees or less, we think the effects won’t be catastrophic. And so that is our goal.”
Scientists say transitioning from burning fossil fuels to more renewable energy is one part.
“But another thing that needs to be part of our portfolio is in managing the land surface. Right now the terrestrial biosphere, the global land surface, the vegetation, the plants the forest, do us the favor of taking about a quarter of the carbon we put in the atmosphere back out. And the ocean does another quarter.”
So how many dollars do those quarters add up to? As political leaders discuss the possibility of carbon credits markets, it will be important to know the numbers.
“If we’re going to put a dollar value on carbon then we need to know how to put it in the forest, how to keep it in forests, how sensitive they are to drought. How prone are they to fire. Because if you spend money and say we’re going to put ‘x’ amount of carbon into a forest and that forest burns up that carbon is now back in the atmosphere so we have to be very careful about crediting these things and insuring against those kinds of scenarios.”
O’Halloran is working closely with Quinn Thomas also at Virginia Tech. Thomas was instrumental in ‘saving’ the state of the art Land-Atmosphere Research Station when it looked like Sweet Briar College in central Virginia might close its doors last year.
Scientists around the world were concerned about its fate until Virginia Tech stepped in with additional new technology and invited O’Halloran to join its faculty. Now that Sweet Briar has remained up and running the tower is collaboration between the two institutions.
And one of the things researchers are finding, is that climate itself, is something of collaboration between forests and the atmosphere as they exchange energy and carbon dioxide. Studies from the new tower are showing that when temperatures rise, the pine forest produces more particles that become air borne, slightly lowering the air temperature.
“And what’s even cooler than that, is that those particles that the forests make, because they interact with clouds and radiation, they’re potentially modifying its own environment. If it can affect radiation in a cloud, then that actually affects the photosynthesis of the forest. So now you have a mechanism, not just where the atmosphere affects the forest, but the forest affects the atmosphere. We say that’s a ‘coupled system.’ Essentially the forest and the atmosphere are talking to each other and we’re just starting to get an idea of how that system works.”
A webcam at the research tower updates every half hour with data and pictures from the site. The data are available in real time so that weather geeks and climate watchers can check in any time.
Quinn Thomasis launching a new project to enable scientists to look many decades ahead and predict the effectiveness of land management practices in agriculture and forestry to mitigate climate change.
“The project is focused on predicting how forest and agriculture management can be used to meet demands for food and fiber while having positive benefits on climate,” said Thomas, assistant professor of forest dynamics and ecosystem modeling in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation.
Thomas is leading the $2.6 million, five-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Research partners include geophysical and biological scientists from multiple institutions.
“Biological predictions and land management in climate models, more broadly called Earth system models, are largely unexplored,” he said. “By viewing climate as part of the Earth system, predictions of future climate fundamentally depend on the interaction of physical, chemical, and biological processes, including human society.
“Our research addresses the need to improve predictions of biological services in the Earth system with a focus on agricultural and forest sustainability,” he continued.
One example of coupled climate-biological-land management prediction is determining how decisions about the timing of crop or forest harvest rotations influence patterns of temperature and precipitation.
“Our aim is to study how agricultural and forestry practices that provide food and timber can alter climate by modifying the energy, water, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Thomas explained.
Uncertainty in climate prediction can be substantial when considering the chaotic nature of the atmosphere and the challenges of predicting future human behavior, as well as the influence of land-use and land-cover change on carbon and energy cycles, he said.
“Presently, society needs climate predictions from climate models at the 10- to 50-year time scale,” Thomas said. “It is on this time horizon that we hypothesize biological services associated with land management, such as carbon storage, may have an important influence on prediction. This project focuses on testing this hypothesis by improving the representation of biological processes and land management in Earth system models.”
The project will use field data to better understand key ecological processes and integrate these findings into a state-of-the-art Earth system model that contributes to the goals of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The model runs on one of the nation’s most powerful supercomputers, located at the National Center for Atmospheric Research-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
“Contributions from the ecological, environmental, and agricultural sciences are needed to resolve discrepancies among models in ecosystem responses to and feedbacks with climate change and to rigorously evaluate the biology in the models,” said Gordon Bonan, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and partner on project.
Additional project partners are Christine Goodale and Jed Sparks, professors in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at Cornell University; Jeffrey Dukes, professor of forestry, natural resources, and biological sciences at Purdue University; Stuart Grandy and Serita Frey, professors in the natural resources and the environment department at the University of New Hampshire; and Professor Thomas Fox, University Distinguished Professor Harold Burkhart, and forestry doctoral student Benjamin Ahlswede of Newport, Virginia, in Virginia Tech’s Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation.
The project, titled “Decadal prediction of sustainable agricultural and forest management — Earth system prediction differs from climate prediction,” also will expand the education and research opportunities of students in natural resources and ecological fields by enabling them to work directly with the nation’s leading climate scientists.
“Communication Breakdown, It’s always the same
I’m having a nervous breakdown, drive me insane!”
This sentiment is not unique to Led Zeppelin fans. Nearly everyone has been in a situation where they felt they weren’t being heard or were frustrated about not understanding what someone else was saying… perhaps to the point of being driven insane. Scientists are not exempt from these feelings and the global change community at Virginia Tech is increasing its understanding of the importance of effective science communication in the work that we do. In keeping with the Global Change Center’s mission, IGC IGEP graduate students and other affiliated graduate students recently participated in a full day Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science Workshop at the Skelton Conference Center.
The day began with a question… When is science complete?
Some (and I’d hope all) would say only once it is communicated. But communication comes in many forms. In the scientific community, this communication has traditionally been in the form of publications in scientific journals or presentations at conferences. Yet, in recent years it has become apparent that communicating to fellow scientists is not sufficient for the modern role of a scientist and often does not have the ability to reach the public in the ways that it needs to. A lot of us now feel that it is our duty to be better scientific communicators for the sake of the future. If we want positive change based on the best-available science, then we need policy makers that believe in this. And to get these policy makers in office, we need a scientifically educated citizenry. So, if we want to be better scientific communicators, how do we do it?
What did you say?
We began the day with a simple exercise….Trying to interpret the esoteric language often used by sports enthusiasts. An example was provided that described an end-of-game highlight. The passage was filled with sports jargon and was– quite frankly–boring! In fact, few in the group really even understood the event being described. (This is probably how everyone else feels when we talk about our research!) With a bit of work from the participants, which included reworking the passage so that there was suspense and drama, we could all now understand the passion of the event. This should be our goal when we describe our research.
Carl Wepking takes a shot at distilling Brandon Semel’s abstract for a “general audience”
So, describe your research… in everyday language, please.
You may have heard of the stigma associated with scientists who “dumb down” their research. Even the famed science communicator, Carl Sagan, was lambasted by the scientific community for being too focused on public outreach and was even denied tenure at Cornell. While the times are changing in this regard and outreach is often formally part of a faculty position, many still don’t want to seem condescending or that they are speaking down to someone. News Flash: Speaking in everyday language isn’t “dumbing it down” or being “condescending”… it’s being accessible. This is your goal. Be accessible to the person with whom you are communicating.
Our exercise in using everyday language to describe research began with an example of a conference abstract from Brandon Semel, an IGC fellow. We were all given about 3 minutes to read the abstract and then asked to describe the research. In a room full of scientists, we estimated that we understood about ½ to ¾ of the material. We then had some “citizen volunteers” from Blacksburg read the abstract and explain whether or not they understood the material. There were…let’s just say, mixed reviews. “Something about animal digestion?” one woman offered.
Here’s the thing–for a scientific conference among peers, this abstract was clearly great. But under a different setting and with a lay audience, use language that is more efficient, while maintaining accuracy. Instead of saying “we observed geophagy”, simply state that “we saw animals eating dirt”. Instead of referring to your study species as “diademed sifakas (Propithecus diadema)”, simply tell your audience that you worked with a type of lemur. If you can reference the popular movie Madagascar, even better, because then they can easily conjure up a mental image of your research animal. Instead of saying that you think one reason for this behavior is to help them with “toxin adsorption”, just say it may help them “pull toxins from their body”. We had a fun time with Brandon’s abstract and clearly there are ways that many of us can apply this to our line of work. What words have you been using so long that you forgot you had to learn them once you entered your field? Think carefully about how much jargon you use with colleagues and make sure to remove these when communicating with those outside of your field.
In addition to removing jargon from your language, think about how many words have a different meaning in science than in everyday life. For example, theory means two very different things in these two contexts. This was hit upon during Sue Hassol’s visit last year as she discussed her tips for communicating climate change science. For a thorough list of what words you may want to reconsider, with alternative words to use, check out this great spreadsheet compiled by Dr. Andrew David Thaler at Southern Fried Science.
Graduate students practice the art of “distilling your message” during the Alan Alda workshop
Distill. Your. Message.
After thoroughly analyzing Brandon’s abstract, we broke into the first session of the day, which was a group exercise in “distilling your message”. This session was focused on solidifying the perfect “elevator speech”. In other words– we learned how to describe our research when we only have a couple of minutes to do so.
Because science is complicated and labor intensive, some scientists get carried away with wanting to include a lot of details upfront. They have trouble getting to the punchline. But science communication is not about rambling about every detail of your research; it is about being able to connect with someone through conversation. The details will come once the conversation starts. You want to get them interested, so that they genuinely want to ask you more questions.
We were each timed one minute and had to explain our research to the rest of the room. I recommend that everyone try this exercise. I promise you that no matter how complicated your research is, you can explain the gist of it in one minute! One tip is to start with something relatable. For example, I use zebra finches as my animal model to study how incubation temperature affects birds, so I can use my hands to give a general size of the bird and tell the person “you’ve probably seen them in pet stores. The males have bright orange cheek patches.” Or because I study environmental influences on phenotype, I can start with “You may have heard of the nature vs. nurture debate.”
Metaphors can work great as well. In a video, we watched a researcher compare the smell of baking cookies in a house to the way a cell follows a trail of concentrated molecules in solution. Try to imagine the metaphors that would work perfectly for your research!
When you are talking about your research, don’t forget to use emotion (passion people!) and look the person in their eyes to make sure they are following you. Finally, if you feel terrible about dealing with a complicated subject in a simple way, tell the person something similar to what Richard Feynman says: “it is much more complicated than this and if you want to know more, I can tell you.” If you do a good job on this, the person you are talking to should have enough intrigue and information to ask you questions about it. This is when you get into the nitty gritty of your subject. I urge everyone to try this out… as much as possible! It is just one minute, so try it with your family, a cashier, a friend, or your dog walker. The more you practice, the more you will refine your message and be able to tailor it to your audience. Good luck!
IGC Fellows Cathy Jachowski and Tony Timpano use “Improv” techniques to enhance their communication skills
Improvisation… for scientists!
Our final session involved multiple improvisational games, where we focused on being present in the room, truly paying attention to people around you (or a single person), and then reading reactions and being responsible for them. Improvising happens every time we have a conversation, so really this need not be thought of any differently than that. However, mastering these skills takes practice. We’ve all thought (or perhaps had someone say to us) “are you even listening to me?” By practicing these skills, we will hopefully get better at 1) knowing when we are not truly present and then taking the steps to make ourselves present and 2) knowing when our audience is not present and how to do to bring them back to us.
One eye-opening exercise was when we had to hold a blank piece of paper and describe the picture on the page. Imagine describing a picture that was well known to you, but unknown to the person you were talking with. What type of detail would you describe so that the other person can be looking at the picture with you? How might you describe the scenery? Or the facial expressions on the peoples’ faces? What type of emotion would you bring to that picture? Now paint the same type of picture for your research. Take the person on the journey with you.
Finally, if the nerves of speaking publicly are too much for you, think about directing your energy outward. Instead of having the periscope on yourself, have it on the other person. As IGC fellow Heather Governor explained, the exercise is about “the absence of self-awareness and more on having an objective… figuring out the best way to get that message across.” Overall, we experienced first-hand what it is like to talk with and have an experience with someone, rather than talking at them. Potentially, there will be no droning on and on in our future!
Jennifer, a Ph.D. student in Fish and Wildlife Conservation and an IGC fellow, is passionately interested in understanding how environmental factors influence the development and long-term trajectory of organisms. She is currently studying how incubation temperature affects growth, behavior, immune function, and sexual selection in the gregarious zebra finch. She hopes her career will straddle the worlds of science, policy, and public outreach/ communication. [/karma_builder_imagebox_2][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_row][/vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text]
Good science and good policy should go hand-in-hand, yet the path from collecting data to constructing policy can seem nebulous and abstract. Many scientists find themselves wondering: What is the role of science in the decision-making process? How does our science impact policy?
This past week, scientists in the Interfaces of Global Change Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program (IGC IGEP) set off for Capitol Hill to address these questions and to gain a better understanding of the process by which science informs policy. In a 3-day workshop led by Patricia Woods of the Woods Institute, students explored the legislative and budget formulation processes, observed contentious hearings on global change issues, and engaged with members of the House of Representatives, governmental agencies, lobbyist groups, scholars, and Congressional staffers.
Students sat in on a House hearing of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee where the Environmental Protection Agency’s new ozone regulations were being hotly debated. During the hearing, Representatives on the committee expressed their views on the new regulations and questioned a panel of experts on the topic.
“It was interesting and useful to see the way these scientists communicated scientific evidence to a non-scientific audience, and how differences in values among congressional committee members influenced the questions they asked witnesses,” IGC IGEP fellow Cathy Jackowski commented.
Students also met with a wide spectrum of professionals engaged in integrating science and policy, among them Don Hellmann, the Assistant Director of Legislative and Congressional Affairs for the National Parks Service, Dr. Lynn Corn of the Congressional Research Service, Congress’s in-house think tank, and Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club, an influential grassroots environmental organization. They also met with Congressional staffers Joseph Majkut, an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow, and Maya Hermann, who has served as a staffer in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for almost a decade. These meetings were very informative to students as they highlighted alternative and influential career paths.
“The trip opened my eyes to other career possibilities, specifically careers that could shape science policy,” IGC IGEP fellow Laura Schoenle remarked. “We met a senator’s staffer who was a AAAS fellow who spoke about his current and future career and outlined opportunities I hadn’t been considering.”
Science Communication
Students in the IGC IGEP have spent the last two years tackling burgeoning topics at the interface of science and policy. This trip, part of the program’s capstone course, served as a culmination of these experiences.
One of the issues that the IGC IGEP focuses on is communicating science to non-scientists and policy makers. IGC IGEP fellow Jen Wagner commented on the value of conversing in person with policy makers who may not have a science background, saying, “We have been talking about science communication a lot and it was really interesting to hear from policy maker staff about what works best for them. This reiterated our need to be aware of the challenges that they face and work to provide them with material that they can work with.”
Resonating with Prior Experiences
Many students drew connections between their study of scientific denialism, a topic covered at great length in the IGC IGEP, and their experiences on the Hill. Fellows enrolled in the IGC capstone course previously read and discussed Merchants of Doubt, a book co-authored by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, and additionally got to speak with Dr. Oreskes when the Global Change Center hosted her for a public lecture the fall of 2015. The theme of the book is the manufacturing of scientific denial and disinformation to intentionally mislead the public regarding scientific issues, such as tobacco, acid rain, ozone, and climate change.
IGC IGEP fellow Heather Govenor attended the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hearing and described how Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D Texas) cautioned the audience of these tactics in her opening statement, saying “she made reference to the tactics of the Tobacco Industry, quoting industry documents proclaiming ‘Doubt is our product.’ Representative Johnson likened those tactics to those being used regarding other environmental issues such as the ozone standard, predicting that her colleagues would “attempt to raise doubts about the scientific evidence,” that “these kinds of tactics have been used before”, and that “Americans are not fooled by these tactics anymore.'”
Beyond Boundaries
Students departed from DC with an increased understanding of governmental processes, and the various ways in which scientists and policymakers interact. President Timothy Sands recently introduced a university-wide initiative Beyond Boundaries, a one-year visioning process that will prepare the university and its graduates to address complex problems of regional, national, and global scales. This trip aligned with the goals of the President’s vision, as students prepared to use their research and training to solve global problems in an ever-changing world.
IGC IGEP faculty member Dr. Jeff Walters (BIOL) expressed his thoughts on the experience saying, “Students learned firsthand how science plays into policy at the highest levels of government, and what they observed resonated with their prior training and experiences in the IGC program in ways that enabled them to achieve a deep understanding. They saw clearly the avenues available for bringing the best available science into decision-making, avenues they could imagine themselves using. The students left DC much more optimistic about the role of science in determining policy than when they arrived. “
Members of the IGC IGEP look forward to continued reflections on their trip as they finish up their capstone course this fall.
As a Ph.D. candidate in Biological Sciences and an IGC fellow, Tamara is studying the brown anole and the effects that threats such as disease, climate change, and introduction have on the anole’s physiology and ecology. Her long-term goal is to work with other scientists and policymakers to recognize and manage these global threats.[/karma_builder_imagebox_2][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][vc_row][/vc_row][/vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text]
