Winter 2020 Newsletter

Letter From STEMAP Team

Dear STEM Ambassadors and Community Partners,

Winter is here and the newest cohort of STEM Ambassadors are working hard to develop ideas for their engagement activities! We received three times the number of applications for our available spots. We hope those we were unable to accommodate in this cohort will apply next fall!

Nalini Nadkarni, the STEMAP Program Director, has been in the news for her public engagement work. Read on to learn about her appearance on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and her work with Mattel and National Geographic on the Explorer Barbie series.

STEMAP’s partner program, the Initiative to Bring Science Programs to the Incarcerated, has published a guide on engaging in correctional facilities. We hope this publicly-available document will help individuals at other institutions launch their own science programs in prisons and jails across the country.

Finally, STEM Ambassador Kendall FitzGerald participated in the AAAS Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering (CASE) Workshop in Washington D.C. Read about her experience developing science policy skills on Capitol Hill!

Thanks to all of our community partners and Ambassadors for the continued support they provide to the program!

Nalini Nadkarni, Director
Caitlin Weber, Program Manager
Megan Young, Program Coordinator

Welcome 2020 Ambassadors!

 The STEM Ambassador Program is excited to welcome 13 new STEM Ambassadors! These scientists come from across campus, their fields of study include anthropology, biology, physics, medicine, and more.

The new cohort will now participate in a series of workshops and ultimately will each carry out an engagement activity. They have already identified possible communities to engage and completed their first workshop. They will be working to learn about the communities they hope to engage and designing engagement activities in the coming weeks.

We received three times the applicants that we had room for. We encourage those we were unable to accommodate in this cohort to apply to our Fall 2020 cohort! As part of our current NSF award, we are developing strategies to expand STEMAP in the future so that we may accommodate more trainees in a cohort.

Below are the 13 new STEM Ambassadors:

The Spring 2020 Cohort

• Stefania Wilks – Anthropology
• Danny Bae – Biology
• Abrianna Soule – Biology
• Connor Healy – Biomedical Engineering
• Hanna Clements – Chemistry
• Travis Morrison – Mechanical Engineering
• Gaelle Batot – Pharmatoxicology
• Bartosz Fornal – Physics
• Emily Scott – Psychology, Cognition and Neural Sciences
• Eddy Dawson – Red Butte Gardens
• Dale Forrister – Biology
• Shelley Reich – Biology
• Robert Zachary Fender – School of Medicine

TreeTop Barbie in the News

Years ago, STEMAP Director Nalini Nadkarni worked with a team of students and seamstresses to design canopy science gear for dolls after identifying iconic Barbies as a potential avenue for broader engagement. This labor of love was designed to encourage children to explore the tree canopy and envision themselves as forest ecologists. Recently, Mattel and National Geographic approached Nalini Nadkarni about a new set of science-focused dolls, inspired by her small-scale efforts. Nalini’s one-of-a-kind Barbie, and the Explorer Barbies available for purchase, have been the focus of wide-scale media attention - from the Salt Lake Tribune to Time and India Today.

NEXUS Membership

We are thrilled to share an opportunity on the University of Utah campus for scientists to become involved in interdisciplinary research. The iNterdisciplinary EXchange for Utah Science (NEXUS) is an interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Utah. NEXUS welcomes researchers across the University of Utah who desire to collaborate on research projects concerning society’s grand challenges, including (1) social disparities & physical / mental health, environment, (2) climate change, the environment and well-being (3) communicating science to the community (4) suicide/violence (5) families and health and (6) opioids. Potential members may be tenure-line faculty, clinical researchers, career-line faculty, and graduate students whose research interests align with the purpose and scope of NEXUS. Membership applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

Benefits to Members

• Interact in an environment that will support and foster interdisciplinary research.
• Eligibility for the NEXUS-sponsored research grants.
• Participation in NEXUS-sponsored conferences and symposia

Expectations of Members

• Actively support and participate in NEXUS-sponsored research seminars and an annual research symposium
• Engage in discussion regarding the creation of new, collaborative research programs.

Visit the NEXUS website for more information – https://nexus.utah.edu/

STEMAP Website Redesigned

The STEM Ambassador Program’s website has a new look! Check out the new layout and let us know if you have any comments!

Nalini Nadkarni on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

STEMAP Director Nalini Nadkarni appeared on a live show of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, the NPR news quiz, this past fall as the show made a stop in Salt Lake City. Peter Sagal, the show’s host, quizzed the Nalini on canapés, the classic hors d’oeuvres from the mid-20th century. Nalini answered enough questions to win a listener a recording from Wait Wait on his or her answering machine! You can listen to the segment on NPR’s website.

INSPIRE Publishes Guide on Engaging in Correctional Facilities

The greatest challenge to doing public engagement of science in corrections is understanding the system’s complex structure and requirements. Recognizing this, Nalini Nadkarni and INSPIRE staff created a guiding document they hope will help others looking to launch science programs in prisons, jails, and secure youth centers.

You can access the guide on Nalini’s website.

Ambassador Reflections

The following article was written by a STEM Ambassador about her engagement experience.

Kendall FitzGerald

“It is important to remember that not all people will reach the same policy conclusion based on the same scientific information.” –Former Rep. Sherwood Boehler (R-NY)

Last March, I had the opportunity to attend the AAAS Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering (CASE) Workshop in Washington D.C. Three other graduate students from the University of Utah and I were sponsored by the Global Change and Sustainability Center to attend this three-day workshop focused on the importance of advocating for science, especially when it comes to federal science funding. As graduate students, we had all benefited from federal science funding in some way, whether through NSF grants or datasets provided by federal agencies, and attending the workshop gave us the skills to effectively advocate for the continuation of such funds.

Following the workshop, we were able to put these skills to the test in meetings on Capitol Hill with the offices of Utah Senators Mitt Romney and Mike Lee and Representative Chris Stewart. In planning for these meetings, we kept the quote from Rep. Boehler in mind, which is something I had also learned through the STEM Ambassadors Program: Difference in perspective on scientific issues is not caused primarily by a lack of information, but rather by a difference in values. With this in mind, we did not approach these meetings as simply an opportunity to overwhelm the staffers with results from our own research and why we viewed them as important. Instead, we did some research on each Congressman and were able to communicate the importance of federal science funding to issues that we knew that they valued. For example, we highlighted the importance of developing a STEM-educated workforce in order to strengthen Utah’s economy given the influx of tech-driven jobs in the state. In showing each Congressman that we had shared values, a central tenet of STEMAP, I believe that we were able to more effectively make our case for the importance of federal science funding.