Winter 2021 Newsletter

Letter From STEMAP Team

Dear STEM Ambassadors and Community Partners,

It has been a busy winter for the STEM Ambassador Program! We are developing new ways to deliver training online to support Ambassadors in engaging remotely.

Program Director Nalini Nadkarni has presented in a variety of remote venues about STEMAP and the value of public engagement. Interest in public engagement of science training is greater than ever!

We were thrilled to run our first cohort of research ethics professionals from the University of Utah Institutional Review Board. Participants are working on a wide array of creative engagement projects. As the pioneers of our new online training, we are filled with appreciation for their patience, flexibility and enthusiasm.

We have just recently launched our Spring 2021 Training, which runs from January to the end of April. Members are hard at work connecting with focal groups. We look forward to seeing where their projects take them!

A member of the 2020 cohort, Connor Healy, is recruiting scientists to help with a virtual museum he has constructed in Minecraft, a popular video game. He plans to use the museum to engage with students who are unable to take field trips.

We have two reflection articles- one from a member of our first cohort in 2016, Michael Zaccheo, and another from a member of the 2018 cohort, Victoria Russell. Michael has launched a science podcast, and reflects on that experience. Victoria has joined the science communication field to lead public engagement with the Center for Synthetic Organic Chemistry at the University of Utah, and discusses their work with the STEM Community Alliance Program.

As always, we are thankful for the Ambassadors and community partners who have worked to expand public engagement during the pandemic. We hope you are all well, and we look forward to the spring!

Thank you,

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

Spreading the word about STEMAP in 2021

By Nalini Nadkarni

People from all over the country want to learn more about the STEM Ambassador Program! As the Director of STEMAP, I have received invitations to bring information about our program training program to other institutions and audiences in 2021. This reflects both the national trend of increasing interest of scientists to carry out effective public engagement of science, and the growing number of STEMAP graduates who are sharing their experiences with members of the public and with others in academia.

The roster of invitations comes from many different types of institutions, which represent the many kinds of stakeholders who wish to enhance public engagement with science. One category of institutions is venues for informal science education, with presentations for the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Florida State Museum of Natural History, and the Natural History Museum of Utah. A second type is entities concerned with science communication training, such as the graduate student SciComm conference at Florida State University and the AAAS Communicating Science Seminar. Third, a number of colleges and universities have requested talks about STEMAP for their undergraduate and graduate students, including Bowdoin College, Hobart and Smith college, North Carolina State University, Syracuse University, and University of Illinois at Springfield.

Several professional societies are also interested in hearing about our program as keynote talks for their annual meetings, including the Society for Restoration Ecology, The Society for Urban Ecology in Portland, and the New Phytologist Keynote for the Ecological Society of America. A number of large meetings that attract a broad audience have also invited information about STEMAP, including a talk as a “Topical Lecture” at the national AAAS meeting. The journal BioScience will be publishing an article about this, and Southern Utah University has made a spot to present this information at their annual “Tanner Humanities Lecture on Human Values”.  STEMAP is also of interest to sectors that seem distant from academia, including a keynote talk for the annual meeting of the Workman’s Compensation Mutual Insurance Company.

Because of the pandemic, these presentations will be delivered remotely. I hope to communicate the excitement of our program and the work of our Ambassadors with the same enthusiasm that would happen in person.

Completion of the STEMAP IRB Cohort

The first STEMAP cohort with the Institutional Review Board Office has completed their training this winter! They are now working on their engagement projects. All five members of the cohort have done excellent work coordinating with their focal groups to identify thoughtful ways to engage remotely. We are grateful for all of their hard work and flexibility with the shift to STEMAP’s online format. Stay tuned to learn more about their projects in our next issue!

Introducing the 2021 Spring Cohort

STEMAP has launched a sixteen-member cohort for Spring 2021. We are so excited to be working with such a great group of scientists. Over the next few months, they will complete the STEMAP training modules and carry out remote engagement projects. Stay tuned for updates on their progress!

Our Spring 2021 Ambassadors:

Infinite Museum Project

COVID-19 has significantly altered how people can engage with science, which means scientists need to rethink our engagement formats. Connor Healy, a graduate of the STEM Ambassador Program, is constructing a virtual museum using the Minecraft video game to enable people to interact with, and even build, science exhibits from their homes.

Connor, in partnership with STEMAP, is recruiting scientists to contribute exhibits to the virtual museum. No experience in Minecraft is necessary and training will be provided. Participants should expect to spend 6 to 12 hours preparing their exhibit over the course of a month. The finished museum will be made available to youth-in-custody through a partnership with the STEM Community Alliance Program. Complete the form below to get involved!

https://forms.gle/WjYFcv9RgC9bFMDPA

If you have more questions, contact Connor Healy (connor.healy@utah.edu).

Ambassador Reflections

The following articles were written by STEM Ambassadors about their engagement experiences, which took place remotely due to COVID-19. In-person programs are postponed until further notice.

Victoria Russell with Tim McFadden

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade Batteries

Tim McFadden, Victoria RussellI previously connected with the STEM Community Alliance Program (STEMCAP) to develop an “Art and Science Workshop” based on cyanotypes. A cyanotype is an early form of photography. When certain photosensitive chemicals react with UV light, they develop deep blue color. Before the image is exposed to UV light, however, working with the photosensitive chemicals requires darkness. When I spoke with STEMCAP about presenting the same workshop this year, there was an immediate problem. You can’t really Zoom in the dark! Science engagement in the era of COVID-19 has challenges. How do hands-on experiments translate to virtual space? How can you read the room when you can’t be in the room? Meeting these challenges requires flexibility, creativity, and also the ability to think outside the box to find new opportunities. The STEMCAP leadership rose to the challenge with brainstorm and planning meetings. In addition to challenges, we realized there was also new opportunity with a virtual engagement platform. There was now a chance for scientists across the country to participate through my association with the Center for Synthetic Organic Electrochemistry.

The Center for Synthetic Organic Chemistry (CSOE) develops electrochemistry techniques to make molecules and medications in a way that’s cheaper, safer, and better for the environment. Developing new chemical methods requires collaboration between chemists at different universities across the U.S., each with their own specialty- computational chemists, organic chemists, analytical chemists, etc. All these chemists all have different interests, different backgrounds, and different science identities. Even though we couldn’t bring the scientists physically into the room with the students, we could virtually leverage the interdisciplinary diversity of CSOE. Doing so could help dispel the intimidating myth of scientists as lone geniuses who work alone in a laboratory and must know everything “science” to function.

Many emails later, with supply logistics conquered, I and several volunteer chemists met our students via Zoom. We did two programs over three days: one on batteries and circuits, and a new “Art and Science” workshop. The students performed four different battery and circuit experiments. They split water into hydrogen and oxygen, built their own circuit sculptures with conductive play-doh (including disco flowers and light up tyrannosaurs), constructed penny batteries, and designed electrolyte batteries using Gatorade, cola, and lemon juice.  A new “Art and Science” workshop focused on the chemistry and history of paper marbling. The students made their own marbled art pieces with paper, shaving cream, and food coloring. Unlike cyanotypes, these hands-on projects could be performed with the lights on.

At each workshop students got to learn what it was like to be a scientist from volunteer chemists located across the country. Each volunteer gave a five-minute presentation about their life both inside and outside the lab, why they chose science, and the path they took to get to where they were. These presentations were full of pictures that brought the audience into the lab space, and to areas of the country they may have never visited. Each scientist had a unique story, and a set of unique interests. Overall, together they were able to paint a picture of the diversity of people that choose chemistry as a career!

First year organic chemistry graduate student Tim McFadden, had this reflection about his experience with STEMCAP:

Science is a journey full of twists and turns. It was rewarding to be a part of someone’s initial steps and to share a bit of my backstory. Many routes lead towards becoming a scientist! As a first-year graduate student, it’s easy to feel imposter syndrome. We tend to focus primarily on the way forward and are quick to forget the ground we’ve covered, the paths traversed. Volunteering with STEMCAP gave me perspective and helped me realize how far I’ve progressed as a student in a short amount of time. The virtual zoom format worked out better than I expected.

Bringing such a diversity of chemists into the outreach space was a new experience for me. The biographical presentations went over really well and drew questions from the students. The challenges of hosting virtual outreach events in the COVID era also provide some new opportunities. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade batteries!

I would like to thank Farmington Bay Youth Center for hosting our virtual activity, and the wonderful leaders at the STEM Community Alliance Program for handling the logistics. I would especially like to thank the CSOE scientists from across the country who volunteered their time to speak with the girls about their very different interests and backgrounds, and their own personal science journeys: Cara Gannett (Cornell University), Mayank Tanwar (University of Minnesota), Cedric Lozano (CalTech), Alex Somozono (CalTech), and Timothy McFadden (University of Utah).

Michael Zaccheo

mpzacc@gmail.com

The Challenges of an Audio Podcast

Many of us have spent the last year wondering how to be productive while staying at home and staying away from everyone else. Creating an audio podcast seemed to me like a good solution. So, I listened to a few science related podcasts by people like Malcom Gladwell and thought “how hard can it be?” All I needed was an interesting topic, a script, a microphone and maybe an instructional YouTube video or two. Six months and many frustrating fits and starts later, my podcast Genes, Brains and Behavior, Episode 1, Optogenetics is now available on Spotify and Google podcasts. I had grossly underestimated the learning curve and the time required to create and publish an audio podcast. My miscalculation wasn’t the product of not knowing which microphone or recording software to use. Those kinds of concerns are well addressed in YouTube videos and in the many podcasts about making podcasts. Buzzsprout.com, a podcast hosting site, is a good how-to tech resource. Instead, it slowly became clear that the problem was me; my lack of experience and skill. So, this brief article isn’t intended to be a step by step primer on creating and publishing a podcast. It’s intended as a description of a few of the many skills I lacked when I started, along with some suggestions for developing those skills.

Know Your Software.

Unless you have access to a recording studio and sound technicians, you’ll be recording and mixing at home using recording/editing software. I used Garage Band, which is pre-loaded on Apple computers, but there are many free and low cost alternatives available. Whatever you use, I strongly recommend that you become very familiar with your recording software before you start recording your podcast.

After several truly awful and amateurish recording/mixing efforts, I decided to learn how to use Garage Band by reading and recording several parts from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, each on separate tracks, along with yet more tracks for musical interludes. Then, I edited and assembled the tracks in a master track. A thespian I am not, but the process taught me how to better record, organize and store the various tracks in a way most conducive to editing and mixing to produce a master track. I learned to remove and to insert segments of recorded audio more seamlessly; how to reduce unwanted background sounds (the hiss of forced air heating systems or the garbage truck outside) and how to produce recordings at reasonably consistent volume and pace.

With a decent USB output microphone and any of the available recording/mixing software you can produce high fidelity audio recordings at home, but experience and practice is essential. At first, I found the software occasionally intuitive, but more often arcane and perplexing. Eventually, I mastered enough of the software’s capabilities to produce a basic podcast. The usual wisdom is that would be writers need to write, a lot, before attempting a novel and in my opinion, would be audio podcasters need to record, a lot, before attempting to create a publishable podcast.

Learn to Speak to No One.

An audio podcast is a strange thing. Since Power Point presentations have become ubiquitous, audiences are now rarely addressed without extensive visual aids, except on radio and in audio podcasts. It’s often an effective approach, but pure audio is more relaxed, less intense and less busy. That may be why podcasts seem better suited to more casual learning efforts and that may be part of the reason audio podcasts have a following. Unfortunately, effectively speaking to an audience that isn’t present and without visual aids is a peculiar skill that few people practice. Most public speaking endeavors offer the speaker immediate feedback both directly via questions and indirectly via audience body language. That feedback is important. In response, an effective speaker can alter cadence or volume or content on the fly. But when you’re alone, recording a podcast from an outline or a detailed script, I found that improvising in real time without the benefit of audience feedback substantially increases the likelihood that your recording will contain some incomprehensible segments. As an alternative, you can achieve some spontaneity by producing numerous “draft” recordings derived from several scripts containing different segments. These drafts can then be later mixed and matched to produce the best result.

To help produce the best result, you can enlist family and friends to create a representative listener focus group. There were 9 people in my focus group, ranging in age from thirty-two to ninety-three years. From my focus group’s feedback, I learned, for example, that maintaining the same energy level for as little as five solid minutes was challenging. After about five minutes of recording, I’d either slow down and lose inflection or speed up and become more animated. Of course, this kind of variation isn’t always a bad thing, but according to my focus group, for a commuter on a bus listening to a podcast with headphones, a little bit goes a long way and too much is distracting. So, I decided to break up my presentation into four minute recorded segments. By listening to the last four minute segment immediately before starting the next one, I was better able to match up energy level, inflection, pace, and volume. Then, because even rudimentary recording software will allow you to seamlessly add separate segments together in a single track, the end result sounds mostly like it was produced during a single, consistent, recording session.

Audio podcast listeners expect a high fidelity, professional product. Without that, even the most interesting content won’t reach a very large audience. Of course, while a low fidelity recording can make listeners tune out an otherwise interesting podcast, high fidelity recording alone won’t make a boring podcast interesting or render one that is poorly aimed more likely to hit the bullseye of the target audience.

Accessible Content Well Presented.

Your choice of subject matter will likely involve some balancing of what you know and what you are interested in against what a podcast audience will find tempting among the myriad of options and engaging once they hit play. Your focus group can help you strike the right balance, but it’s your podcast and the subject matter you choose might depend on whether you’re more interested in high download numbers or in maximizing your listeners’ educational opportunity or on some other metric influenced by your personal goals. It’s a matter of personal preference and once you decide, I recommend staying committed to your goals throughout the process. If your goals change, you may need to start over again.

Whatever subject matter you select, you should identify a target audience before you start writing and recording and then, make sure your presentation is accessible to the audience you’ve identified. Once again, a focus group is important. Your focus group should be representative of your target audience and I found that presenting the entire group several different alternative master tracks, each with more or less detail, from which each member could select the best one, was a good way to make sure the podcast matched the expected audience. The same is true for material that might be controversial. Episode 1 of my podcast includes descriptions of two experiments reported in peer reviewed journals, both involving animal testing using techniques to manipulate cognition and behavior. I knew that some members of my audience would find any mention of animal testing troubling and some would consider all animal testing immoral. Describing these experiments was, however, simply the best way to convey essential aspects of my podcast subject matter. It had to be done. My first instinct was to plow ahead, describe the experiments and if some were offended, so be it.

Eventually, though, based on very clear focus group feedback I decided that a matter-of-fact statement of the importance of the animal testing and why it was included in my podcast was the best approach. In this instance, and most others, in order to receive specific feedback I had to ask specific questions of the feedback group and request that they choose one among several specific alternatives.

Conclusion.

If you decide to publish a podcast, I hope the foregoing helps to make the process a little less frustrating for you than it was for me. If you listen to my podcast, you may conclude that I never followed my own advice. It’s certainly true that I continued to struggle. I’m confident though that the techniques I’ve addressed here improved my final product, although also leaving ample room for further improvement in the upcoming Episode #2.