Problem

“I do think that actual participation in research is an overlooked area for this public touchpoint with science. If we think about an individual behavioral researcher who’s doing however many experiments a year, that single researcher might be interacting, in some limited capacity, with thousands of members of the public per year.”

Problem

“The life sciences already shape society, often in ways that are invisible. How are community members aware of life-sciences issues, and how are they able to communicate about them?”

Solution

“We have a board, staff, and community members, but the science itself is member-driven. If you want to do a research project here, and it is safe, feasible, and supported by our equipment, then you get to do it. That makes the community bio lab participatory.”

Evidence

“In our two-year pilot of Break into Biotech, around 50% of participants reported working in a career-aligned role within three months of leaving the program, and no one was unemployed within three months.”

Problem

“We had a conversation with program officers there about the distrust in science and the challenges facing science communication during the pandemic, which were really in full force.”

Solution

“So we decided to propose a film about observation as an entry point into science, and about seeing scientists as humans, how they think, and how they collaborate. They’re not always in their labs. They’re out questioning unfamiliar spaces.”

Insight

“One thing we’ve learned is that you have to be authentic and bring yourself to what you’re sharing. I’m a former scientist, as you mentioned, and we’re never really taught to talk about our science that way.”

Challenges

“One challenge was that the day-long events were invitation-only. We tried to bring together a diverse group of participants, but they were relatively small, usually around 20 people. And the screenings attracted whoever decided to come see a science and nature film, so there was some audience self-selection.”

Evidence

“For four years now, I’ve been training and organizing undergrads to be salamander stewards—now we call them salamander rangers—who collect data. I trained 200 students to do this. It’s student-led, and it really is community science.”

Evidence

“And it’s really cool, because the citizen scientists that have been doing this for a while—we have some volunteers that have done thousands of annotations and have become real experts.”

Insight

“One of the really nice things about many of these citizen science platforms is we can use them at no cost to the government and no cost to the taxpayer. So we don’t pay a licensing fee to Zooniverse, so it’s really just our staff time that goes into maintaining the project.”

Solution

“What we do is develop K–12 science curriculum for teachers to use in their classrooms that is more representative of normally underrepresented students, mainly Black and Brown students, women, queer students, really any population that has traditionally been left out of textbooks.”

Solution

“We accept all projects that are working on citizen science and water. So as long as there’s a link with citizen science and water, you will be accepted to the platform.”

Evidence

“De La Vega has run incredible groundbreaking Our Voice projects there with the school children who live there, and so they are the citizen scientists. ... These adolescents have done the most incredible things in terms of finding ways to decrease the amount of standing water that is there.”

Solution

“A very important key ingredient of Our Voice is: make sure that you collect data that is easy for people to collect and meaningful. ... It allows people to take photos and to narrate what’s working well in their environments and what’s not working so well in their environment.”

Evidence

“And it turns out that the number one reason people like to get involved in doing these online science projects is just to contribute to the pool of human knowledge. People want to engage in meaningful activities; they want to contribute to science.”

Challenges

“The biggest inhibiting factor, I think, for most people, is time. ... So the nice thing about projects like the projects on the Zooniverse platform is that they don’t require an individual to make any kind of a time commitment.”

Problem

“I never saw myself as being someone who is affected by climate change in my day-to-day life, or I just didn’t think it had anything to do with me or my legacy or posterity.”

Problem

“At the same time, we see growing news deserts across the nation, as well as declining public trust in the media, which have created conditions in which science misinformation can more easily take hold.”

Insight

“Having data and publications publicly accessible allows people to expand on that early curiosity and connect with both science and scientists. It also helps break down the idea of the academic ivory tower and the perception that scientists gatekeep our knowledge and our data.”

Challenges

“Like all datasets, publicly generated data can have biases and gaps, so it’s appropriate to use participatory science data when it’s relevant to your research question and when any limitations, or biases, or gaps in the data are either not impactful for the question you’re asking or can be statistically accounted for in your analysis.”

Solution

“So the idea behind this project is to basically talk to basic scientists ... specifically basic scientists who are trying to incorporate this sort of ethical dimension into their work.”

Solution

“From that project, we created HamSCI, which is really a broader initiative to bring together amateur radio operators and professional space physicists to help each other out.”

Challenges

“Traditional methodologies often fall short in terms of spatial coverage. Amateur radio operators and other volunteers can help fill in the gaps, but, of course, they also fall short in a similar way simply because the geospace system is so large.”

Solution

“So I combined my backgrounds in marine conservation biology and ceramic sculpture to visualize climate change with the goal of inspiring social change and policy change, and translating concepts from environmental science into sculptural installations and objects in an attempt to bring the beauty and fragility of marine life above the surface and into view.”

Solution

“We engage with community and help people to see through hands-on play that math is more than what they learned in school. It’s fun, beautiful, and creative.”

Problem

“So the first thing, of course, is you sit with this highly complex scientific paper, on the one hand, and on the other hand, you have a language that really struggles. You have six languages that really struggle to accommodate this complex material because of the lack of terminology.”

Problem

“So during the COVID pandemic, one thing that I noticed was that there was a lot of scientific information that was being discovered in real time, but sometimes some of those details and some of that information was not being translated into different languages.”

Challenges

“So if I were to do a science communication activity, myself, and I do an evaluation, maybe I put it on a personal website, or maybe it only goes to the client. Whereas if you're in an academic setting your drive is to get published within a paper, or that's your distribution method.”

Solution

“Our Civic Science Clinic is our experiential learning program that we run over the summer. It’s a fellowship that puts students in service to society, either working in the Massachusetts State House or in Boston-based nonprofit organizations.”

Solution

“And we also provide maps that show you where you may experience bright flashing lights or experience loud stimuli. So you can plan your museum experience accordingly. We also try to incorporate these tenets of science within reach, even in exhibit design as well.”

Solution

“We are a predominantly graduate-student-run group focused on talking about science policy and science diplomacy issues and bringing that to the larger graduate student and postdoc body here at Hopkins.”

Insight

“I urge all of us, as scientists, to read beyond our natural or physical science fields, to engage with our social science colleagues, to engage with our colleagues in other scientific fields, the humanities, so that we can better understand what it is that we’re dealing with.”