Newswise — As science becomes increasingly specialized, communicating scientific findings becomes more complex. But how does the next generation of scientists get its start explaining research to the public? One answer is an innovative program for graduate students, inaugurated at a recent scientific meeting for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB).
Jake Socha, head of the Public Affairs Committee of SICB and an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, used his long-term interest in popular science writing to initiate a competition for graduate students. Student researchers could receive travel funds to the annual meeting in San Francisco in 2013 in exchange for writing news stories about someone else’s research presented at the meeting. “I thought that we had a nice venue for creating a science-writing opportunity for students. The idea was to create a low-pressure situation for them to write in a popular voice, and to provide some guidance and training along the way,” Socha said. “If I were a student, I would have jumped at the chance to do something like this.”
Potential student journalists applied to the program with a short writing sample that was evaluated by several members of the committee, including Eric Tytell of Tufts University and Molly Jacobs of McDaniel College. Successful applicants presented their own research and then chose a story to write from other presentations at the meeting, based on their own scientific interests. Socha explained, “Our intention here was that if we allowed the journalists to pick what they wanted, over time we'd have a pretty diverse set of stories, and we'd also get the most interesting pieces because the journalists would be excited about their topics.”
The six student journalists turned in a wide variety of stories, representing the diversity of topics at the SICB meeting that brings together researchers from many different biological disciplines. Anne Madden, a doctoral candidate at Tufts University studying the microbial ecology of wasp nests, wrote about the microbial symbionts that allow wood rats to eat poisonous plants. Medhavi Ambardar, who usually focuses on the reproduction of eastern bluebirds during her studies at Oklahoma State University, wrote about another student’s work on the biogeography of coral reefs. Hugo Dutel, a doctoral student in Paris, France who is researching an ancient lobe-finned fish, wrote about the work of two Australian scientists examining the efficiency of soccer kicks from an evolutionary perspective.
The six student journalists were guided in their writing by members of the Public Affairs Committee and Karen Knight, an editor from the Journal of Experimental Biology. The stories are available online at the society’s web site, www.sicb.org Socha affirms the success of the initial effort. “We've all been extremely pleased with the stories that the student journalists have written.” He adds, “Perhaps more importantly, the journalists themselves have seemed to have gotten a lot out of this program. We're definitely going to keep it going for as long as we can.”
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