This week, Sarah Schneider (of ESA’s Editorial Office/publications) responds to the #MySciComm questions! We’re delighted to share her story with you, as it is a window into a type of SciComm career that is pivotal to how we do science. Sarah Schneider has worked for the Publications Office of the Ecological Society of America since 2013. These days, she works primarily…
A thought-provoking piece in Facets. What do you think?
The University of Michigan’s Career Center and Head-Heart-Hands provide resources on how to plan a career change in three stages (HHH) and how to talk about transferable skills developed during a PhD (UMCC).
Numerous articles, resources, podcasts, and whole ventures (e.g., StoryCorps; The Moth) address key aspects of narrative and storytelling that are valuable (even essential) for sharing science. See the following articles for a few we find particularly helpful, insightful, or thought-provoking. These resources may change how you do things and/or provide you with useful citations to justify how you tell science…
Carolyn Trietsch writes in Science about the significant role that regular craft-making has assumed in her entomology department at Pennsylvania State University-University Park. The article points to valuable benefits including transdisciplinary collaborations and networking across labs, art-based science communication and outreach, and entomological collections curation.
Effective November 2018, The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America will accept submissions for consideration in a new section dedicated to Communicating Science. All articles published in the series are free to publish and freely available via open access. This new space in the journal provides ESA members interested in communication and engagement a platform for publishing articles on…
New Web Articles on National Parks in the History of Science National parks in the United States have hosted some of the most significant and influential research projects in ecology and other fields. Many of those studies have launched new lines of inquiry, revealed new taxa, informed foundational ideas in a variety of disciplines, provided “real-world” complements to laboratory studies,…
This week, Johanna “Pika Jo” Varner responds to the #MySciComm questions! We’re thrilled to share her story with you, not least because she was the originator and on-going inspiration for our annual #SketchYourScience activity at the C&E Section booth at annual meetings. Johanna Varner is an ecologist who studies how climate change affects pikas, small mammals closely related to rabbits….
The Intergroup Dialogue Project website indicates that IDP was founded as a series of undergraduate-focused courses and resources at Cornell University (2012). By 2016, IDP had developed “the first and only graduate and postdoc dialogue program in the country.” Beyond the programs and courses IDP offers at Cornell, they provide an overview of their core tool, the LARA Method: Listen,…
In this article in Nature Biotechnology, Maximiliaan Schillebeeckx, Brett Maricque, and Cory Lewis detail: The limited availability of academic positions vs number of PhDs granted per year; What a group of PhD students and postdocs at Washington University-St. Louis are doing to expand their training and career options in light of the academic job market. Broadly, the authors call for grassroots…
In this article from Aeon, Dr. Michela Massimi takes on the essential-yet-complex role of truth in science. Philosophical, thought-provoking, and essential reading. Lots to ponder in here about how truth gets portrayed, how perceptions of what is true change, notions of truth vs. consensus, and the implications of these nuances and fluidity for public trust in science.
According to Tracey L. Weissgerber, Natasa M. Milic, Stacey J. Winham, and Vesna D. Garovic, proper representation of small data sets and sample sizes allows accurate interpretation. Doing so, they assert, requires displaying continuous data. But, they write, “Most papers presented continuous data in bar and line graphs. This is problematic, as many different data distributions can lead to the same…
If you are a current Section member, please check your inbox for an email with a link to the voting form. Voting* will close on February 12, 2019. Section officer elections are key, and your vote matters. Officers: plan a lot of the annual meeting trainings, collaborate with other sections and governance committees to ensure comm & engagement topics are…
This week, Marty Downs responds to the #MySciComm questions! Marty is the Deputy Director of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Communications Office, based at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara. She manages internal and external communications for a network of over 2000 environmental scientists and 28 diverse research sites. Marty began her career…
Raise your hand, sign up, and contribute your vision to the Communication & Engagement Section as an officer! Nominations for Chairperson-elect and Secretary are open, according to the following schedule. Jan 1-31: nomination period (Submit your self-nomination here!) Feb 1-10: voting period Feb 10: announcement of elected officers Feb. 21, 2019: deadline for ESA contributed abstracts Annual meeting: transition from…
Planning on teaching a course about scientific writing next semester? But, you haven’t finalized your syllabus yet? Ecologist Stephen Heard (@scientistseessquirrel) invites you to use his scientific writing course syllabus! He also wrote a book – The Scientist’s Guide to Writing – that is a useful companion to the syllabus.
This week, Diogo Veríssimo updates his responses to the #MySciComm questions! Diogo is a biologist turned scientist turned marketer! He decided that he could have the cake and eat it, and so focused his research on the fledgling field of conservation marketing, the use of marketing theory and techniques to help promoted biodiversity-friendly behaviors. He is currently an Oxford Martin…
Read full paper here. Quoting from the abstract: “There is widespread interest in evaluating the social impacts of research and other scholarly activities. Conventional metrics for social impacts focus on economics or wealth creation, such as patents or technology transfer. These kinds of metrics are less appropriate for many scholarly fields, and miss the specific social concerns or needs that…
“The Science Media Centre of Canada is a registered charitable organization that supports journalists writing about the sciences, engineering and technology.” The Science Media Centre of Canada will: work with you to help your research reach journalists list your research in an embargo-controlled weekly newsletter tailored for journalists teach workshops for you share its free resources on how to effectively interact…
If you are working in, interested in, and/or supportive of art-science integration, this extensive list of citations curated by Art = Opportunity may be useful for your project justification, fundraising efforts, etc. Excerpt from the Art = Opportunity project website: “ART=OPPORTUNITY is a campaign started in San Diego County, funded by a grant from the Stuart Foundation, and highlighting arts…