“If we build it, will they come?” Executive Director Dr. Lisa Scheifele shares insights from the Baltimore Underground Science Space (BUGSS)

CivicSciTV’s ‘Questions of the Day’ Host Fanuel Muindi interviews Lisa Scheifele, Executive Director of the Baltimore Underground Science Space (BUGSS) which is a community biology lab. Scheifele shares the origins of BUGSS and its mission to make science accessible to the community. The discussion highlights innovative projects like the Open Insulin Project and explores BUGSS’ bottom-up approach, which fosters collaboration between scientists, students, and community members.

Conversation Analysis

1. Grassroots Origins and Adaptability:

• Lisa Scheifele provides a detailed origin story of BUGSS, explaining how it grew out of community interest, particularly through participation in the iGEM competition (an international bioengineering contest). This shows how organic community demand can drive the creation of accessible scientific spaces. As Scheifele recalls, “Tom and two other founders just rented this office suite in an old factory and put in some lab benches and got some old equipment off of eBay and said, you know, if we build it, will people come and will they be interested in using the space and doing research and learning things?”

• This “if we build it, will they come?” mentality reflects the experimental nature of community science initiatives, demonstrating a willingness to take risks and respond to evolving community needs. However, it also suggests a reactive approach, which could face limitations as the organization grows. Despite this, BUGSS’s longevity speaks to its success in responding to community demand, as Scheifele notes: “Somehow, 12 years later, we’re still here. So I guess there was enough interest in demand from the community.”

2. Bottom-Up Approach:

• A significant strength of BUGSS is its bottom-up model, which allows community members to guide the focus of its projects. This contrasts with the hierarchical nature of many academic institutions, where research agendas are typically set from the top down. Scheifele emphasizes that BUGSS shapes its programming around community interests: “We really follow what the community’s interests are… if people show up, then we start doing it. And people keep showing up, we keep doing it.”

This decentralized approach fosters engagement and ownership among participants, empowering them to take initiative in their own projects. It ensures that BUGSS remains responsive to the people it serves, creating a dynamic environment where participants feel invested in the outcomes.

• Scheifele emphasizes that BUGSS adjusts its programming based on participant interest and persistence. This decentralized model fosters engagement and ownership among participants, whether they are high school students, professional scientists, or artists.

3. Diversity of Projects and Participants:

The wide range of projects at BUGSS, such as the Open Insulin Project, Barcoding the Harbor, and Chromoproteins, demonstrates the lab’s interdisciplinary nature. These projects engage participants from diverse fields, including medicine, environmental science, and art. According to Scheifele, “We get people, really, from all walks of life, lots of professionals, but very often they’re engineers or software people or accountants, librarians. We get a lot of college and even high school students who just aren’t getting enough in their current classes and they really want to go deeper.”

This diversity, both in projects and participants, is essential for fostering collaboration across disciplines. By bringing together people with varied expertise, BUGSS creates an environment where different perspectives lead to innovative solutions and creative exploration.

4. Empowering Non-Scientists:

• BUGSS is particularly successful in empowering individuals who might not typically see themselves as scientists. Through initiatives like iGEM, where high school and college students lead their own research projects, BUGSS offers a hands-on, inquiry-driven model of science. Scheifele underscores this point: “You don’t have to have a PhD to consider yourself a scientist.”

This model challenges traditional notions of scientific elitism by inviting non-scientists to participate in high-level research. It fosters scientific literacy and curiosity, helping participants realize that they, too, can contribute meaningfully to scientific discovery. This inclusive approach is a powerful way to engage underrepresented groups and make science more accessible.

5. Ecosystem and Partnerships:

• BUGSS benefits from its proximity to leading research institutions, such as Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health, by leveraging the expertise of graduate students and postdocs. Many of these individuals serve as mentors and instructors at BUGSS. Scheifele notes, “A lot of the people who teach our courses, who mentor our projects, are working at some of these major research institutions, and it’s just a really mutually beneficial relationship.”

These partnerships enhance BUGSS’s ability to offer cutting-edge programming while providing students and postdocs with valuable public engagement and mentoring experience. This collaboration strengthens both BUGSS’s community-driven mission and its connection to the larger research ecosystem.

6. Tracking and Measuring Impact:

• As funders increasingly demand more rigorous outcome data to assess the impact of the projects they support, community-driven organizations like BUGSS face the challenge of implementing structured methods for tracking engagement and outcomes. While these organizations provide invaluable public engagement with science, their capacity to rigorously evaluate the success of their programs often lags behind due to limited resources and staffing.

In the case of BUGSS, Lisa Scheifele acknowledges this challenge, explaining that their impact assessment is often anecdotal and not as systematically tracked as it could be: “We assess, kind of, when people take courses with us… but as a volunteer organization, we’re not always as good about… tracking those things in ways that aren’t just anecdotal.” This is a common issue for many grassroots science initiatives, which operate with limited staff, a volunteer-driven workforce, and shoestring budgets.

The irony of the current funding landscape is that, while funders often demand detailed evaluation data, they may not always provide the necessary financial support to carry out those evaluations. Evaluation—particularly longterm outcome tracking—requires additional resources, both in terms of time and expertise. Organizations need dedicated staff, tools, and systems to systematically collect, analyze, and report data.

Fanuel Muindi

Fanuel Muindi is a former neuroscientist turned civic science scholar-journalist and entrepreneur. He is a Professor of Practice in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University where he leads the Civic Science Media Lab. Dr. Muindi received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology and PhD in Organismal Biology from Morehouse College and Stanford University respectively. He completed his postdoctoral training at MIT.

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