Meet the Civic Science Fellows

Project focus: Michelle will investigate science-related misinformation in social and online media and how audiences interact with it, as well as develop and test potential interventions.

About Michelle
Michelle A. Amazeen is Director of the Communication Research Center and an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations at Boston University. Michelle’s research program examines mediated persuasion and misinformation, exploring the nature and persuasive effects of misinformation and efforts to correct it. She employs a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to yield results with practical applications for journalists, educators, policymakers, and consumers who strive to foster recognition of and resistance to persuasion and misinformation in media. Her work has been previously funded by the American Press Institute and the New America Foundation and has appeared in academic publications such as Communication Monographs; Digital Journalism; Journalism; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; Media, Culture & Society; and New Media & Society. She is among the team of 22 prominent scholars from around the globe with expertise in misinformation and its debunking who contributed to The Debunking Handbook 2020—a consensus document summarizing the science of debunking for engaged citizens, policymakers, journalists, and other practitioners. She is also a contributor to “The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook,” a practical guide to help fight the spread of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines.

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1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
Given rampant misinformation, my team launched a three-phase study to explore two broad questions: 1) Which are the most science-misinformed communities, and 2) what are effective ways to combat science-related misperceptions in social media?

In phase 1, we investigated the types of science-related misinformation topics and messages that receive amplification and by which sources. We know that marginalized groups in the U.S. have experienced a plethora of racial and ethnic inequities and that global issues such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have further amplified these disparities, increasing distrust in science. Moreover, while misinformation is pervasive on social media platforms, we find that corporate and special interests often create narratives that are perpetuated not only by social media but via corporate mainstream media, as well.

In phase 2, we conducted focus groups among Blacks and Latinos who qualified as misinformation-susceptible audiences to discuss their engagement with and perceptions of science. While participants were familiar with best practices of understanding the source of information and triangulation, they were highly distrustful of authority figures, celebrity testimonials, and fact-checking strategies that attempt to combat online misinformation. Most were receptive to an inoculation message that forewarned about dubious strategies rather than refuting specific claims.

We are beginning the final phase of the project: selecting the most influential misinformation messages across topics and conducting a laboratory experiment among a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents to determine which of the interventions modified from phase 2 are most effective at mitigating scientific misperceptions.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
As a communication researcher, my work as a Fellow has enabled me to collaborate with other scholars I may not have had the opportunity to work with to advance a program of research addressing a topic of increasing importance and complexity: scientific misinformation. I now have a network of Fellows with whom to share ideas about continuing my research and supporting them in their own projects. I plan to engage policy-makers to assist in efforts to further develop interventions that will reduce public exposure and consumption of scientific misinformation.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
While I understood the project I designed would be collaborative in nature, I enjoyed a much more extensive collaboration process from the Fellows network as a whole. Despite very different objectives and approaches to our work, I found our cohort welcoming and inclusive as we each aspired to build community engagement with science or address problems rooted in science.

As for an insight from my project on scientific misinformation, there’s a lot of distrust in the public, especially among marginalized groups. A lot of this distrust is of our own making through policies, practices, and values we have adopted. The way our communication systems are structured perpetuates some of this distrust and most of the misinformation.

Project focus: In collaboration with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the University of Michigan, Elyse will help to address how to modernize scholarship to provide visibility, reward, and advancement to faculty and staff engaging the public in scientific projects to serve societal needs.

About Elyse
Elyse L. Aurbach is a public engagement professional and researcher. She creates communities, programs, and products that maximize assets and address needs to support scholars in engaging with different publics. She specializes in translating research into useful tools for practice, building effective training and capacity-building programs, and developing frameworks that synthesize scholarship and practitioner knowledge to help public engagement systems evolve. As Public Engagement Lead with the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation, Aurbach leads strategy and program development as part of a Presidential strategic area of focus for faculty public engagement. Prior to joining the Academic Innovation team, Aurbach pursued a double-life as a scientist studying the neurobiological underpinnings of major depression and leading a number of projects to improve science communication and public engagement, including developing and teaching communication courses in person and online and Co-Bossing with Nerd Nite Ann Arbor. She is also a co-founder and former director of RELATE, a science communication and public engagement organization. Aurbach was a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, a finalist for the AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science, and an ARIS Fellow.

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1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
I worked with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities on a project about transforming institutions of higher education, in order to help them better support engaged- and equity-oriented scholars. Through a deep literature review, a series of institutional case studies, and convenings with experts in the field, my project will culminate in a framework for action described in a report, due out in November 2023.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
Universities are institutions that tend to move with deep deliberation. I hope this project will not only catalyze deep reflection within institutions of higher education, but also equip change-makers with valuable tools to evaluate their institutional context, plan reforms, and build a coalition for action that can drive real change on individual campuses.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
The Civic Science community is rich in thought leaders and partners—I’m grateful for the opportunity to have connected with the Network through my Fellowship to pursue this work. The Fellowship gave me the opportunity to be supported in pursuing an effort that has extended my skills and knowledge in ways that I would not have otherwise, and I’m excited to bring these assets to bear during the course of my career!

Project focus: Laura will connect and support Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) members in building capacity for community science programs, including developing a virtual training program, building a toolkit of resources, and establishing a community of practice for exchange and learning.

About Laura
Laura Bartock is an experienced facilitator, science communicator, and social scientist who is passionate about advancing the practice of community-centered science. Laura comes to the Association of Science and Technology Centers with more than five years of experience managing collaborative multi-party processes and providing strategic guidance for groups working to understand complex science and address shared challenges. Her past projects have focused on implementing collaborative adaptive management on the Missouri River, exploring best practices for deep seabed mining, and investigating policy pathways to respond to climate change. Laura holds a master’s degree in Environmental Science (Environmental Communication and Participatory Processes) from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Laura also serves as a Community Science Fellow for the American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange. Laura is working with the Kiamichi River Legacy Alliance, a community group based in southeastern Oklahoma, to design and execute a scientific project to advance their goal of protecting the waters of the Kiamichi River Basin. Laura also supports the community group in its efforts to engage with public audiences, media, and decision-makers.

OUR NEWEST ONLINE RESOURCE, THE “GETTING STARTED IN COMMUNITY SCIENCE” DISCUSSION GUIDE, HELPS STAFF AT INFORMAL SCIENCE LEARNING INSTITUTIONS UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL ROLES THEIR SCIENCE CENTER OR MUSEUM CAN PLAY IN COMMUNITY SCIENCE AND PROVIDES GUIDANCE FOR INITIATING CONVERSATIONS WITH POTENTIAL COMMUNITY-BASED PARTNERS, WITH A FOCUS ON CO-CREATION AND EQUITABLE COLLABORATION:
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1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
The Association of Science and Technology Centers is a membership association of science centers, museums, and other informal science learning institutions, and my role as Community Science Fellow is to support our members in building their capacity to serve as partners in community science. I facilitate peer-to-peer learning opportunities, design strategic planning resources, and provide training through fellowship and other opportunities, all intended to help ground museum professionals in the principles of equity and collaboration.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
As trusted institutions and inclusive spaces, science centers are uniquely positioned to mobilize and support community science to meet the needs and desires of local communities while advancing their missions. I hope that the support I’ve provided and the resources I’ve curated will catalyze future community science efforts that can in turn become additional learning opportunities.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
It’s important to have an intentional and clear goal to guide your work—a north star—but it is equally important to be flexible and adaptable in your approaches toward your goal. Inevitably you will encounter challenges to your assumptions and working theories, and it’s important to stay open to learning in those moments when new information and experiences become available to you.

Project focus: Lomax will focus on ethics, science, and society, including seeking a pathway to responsible creation and use of neural organoids that accounts for and incorporates public perception, as well as the ethical and policy implications of the technology.

About Lomax
Lomax Boyd is a neurobiologist serving as the Civic Science Fellow based at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. His research investigating the origins of the human brain has provoked curiosity and wonder about what it means to be human, but also raised ethical questions about how to seek, understand, and share beliefs about ourselves. He utilizes his experiences as a former documentary filmmaker at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and Fulbright Scholar at the National Film Board of Canada, and a creative technologist at HHMI to explore opportunities for integrating scientific and public understandings of the human brain, and the human being, more broadly.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
The focus of my project was to explore how neuroscience research using human brain organoids could better reflect the social and ethical concerns expressed by diverse publics. I engaged in numerous collaborative and independent projects on the ethics of human brain organoids. These efforts included co-authoring a paper published in AJOB Neuroscience on the risks of bioethics discourse in public engagement; serving as an embedded ethicist on a successfully funded project establishing a field of Organoid Intelligence; leading the effort to establish a Dana Center for Neuroscience and Society at Johns Hopkins; attending a research retreat on the ethics of cerebral organoids in Tubingin, Germany; preparing two manuscripts for two upcoming special collections where I propose pathways for ethical engagement; conducting a community of practice survey with early career neuroscientists interested in societal issues; and organizing a co-design workshop bringing neuroscientists and disease advocacy groups together to address challenges facing both groups.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I hope the outputs of my fellowship will demonstrate the need and value of having Neuroscience and Society scholars embedded within academia, who bridge the interface between academic research and social issues. I hope this will demonstrate the value of practicing neuroscientists who are also trained ethicists, as is common in the medical field where academic clinicians are also bioethics scholars. Only by having our feet in both worlds can we hope to gain access, trust, and legitimacy to work across disciplines on challenging intersectional issues.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
My independent project, “Habitats for Hybrids,” illuminates a scientific and ethical path for human brain organoids research involving animals. This project illustrates how scientific ambitions and ethical concerns can converge on shared solutions. I propose a solution to the impasse where scientists want to create experimental models of the human brain, while ethicists express concern about respecting the moral status of these entities. “Habitats for Hybrids” proposes that animal models of the human brain require human-like habitats—complex socio-environments—in order to facilitate proper brain development. My synthesis calls for an entirely new field of empirical neuroethics where the moral status and scientific value of hybrid entities, are discovered from the merging of neuroscience, ethology, and ethics in order to create a scientifically useful and ethically justified model of the human brain.

Project focus: Kelsey, in collaboration with EDGI Civic Science Fellow Mark Milton Chambers, will focus on environmental data governance and justice, exploring models for tailoring federal environmental data to the needs of communities.

About Kelsey

Kelsey Breseman works on environmental accountability, data ownership models, and intentional community at the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Her current main work there, the Environmental Enforcement Watch, bridges environmental justice-focused communities with federal environmental enforcement practices through highly accessible data science tools and reports. Kelsey has a B.S. in Neural Engineering from Olin College, experience founding and managing tech startups, and a history of activist leadership for progressive causes. She has given dozens of conference talks and workshops at technical conferences across four continents, primarily discussing and teaching open source, open project governance, and hardware protocols for internet-connected devices. On the side, she’s currently working on an M.S. in Data Science from UT Austin.

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1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My Fellowship was in designing data tools to be more useful in furthering community-grounded environmental justice at three levels: immediate (community-grounded), near future (work with federal agencies), and further future (connecting Web3 and environmental justice concepts). I worked with EDGI’s Environmental Enforcement Watch to co-develop data-based tools with community groups to leverage EPA data towards their self-advocacy work, such as identifying companies violating Clean Water Act permits in their watersheds. At the federal level, I helped the EPA build more usable interfaces for their permit violation public email notification tool “ECHO Notify” and their new benzene fenceline monitoring dashboard. I am in conversation with their digital tools team around improving their process for user testing, and have been hired to help NASA build design priorities for their air quality monitoring data based on community needs. Finally, I have worked to bring language and perspectives from the environmental justice movement into the creation of principles around data ownership and stakeholder values for a next version of the Internet. Because many of the decentralized web/Web3 tools are currently very energy-intensive, I worked with communities impacted by energy infrastructure, such as communities sited near petroleum refineries. I developed and delivered a curriculum on the technical infrastructure behind these technologies to help these groups voice opinions and concerns on the technology’s values and flaws, and then brought that feedback to the Internet Archive’s DWeb community to influence the development of DWeb Principles in ways that include environmental justice language.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
People deserve to feel powerful over their own lives and the societies they live in. In my Fellowship, I hope that I have been a bridge builder between the needs of communities and people who make decisions that impact those communities’ lives—with the ultimate goal of shifting more of that power into impacted communities’ hands. EDGI works to bring about a modern “environmental right to know,” updated, per the environmental justice coalition Coming Clean, to “the right to know, participate, and decide.” Many communities, disproportionately communities of color, suffer a double burden of both environmental health impacts such as asthma and cancer, and the additional burden of proving that harm—harm that often comes from nearby industrial facilities’ pollution. When communities seek to prove this harm, their scientific research is often discounted by officials due to a lack of institutional affiliation. My direct work has been to work with communities to leverage existing, official proofs of harm—EPA data—in a format that effectively communicates community needs. At the federal level, I have ensured EPA and NASA officials’ awareness of their data tools’ inaccessibility and demonstrated improved formats co-developed with communities to center their values. In a more theoretical space, the new tooling the decentralized web brings should give communities the ability to control more of the data, and more of the narratives, that describe them and their health. I hope my work in that space makes this technology more accessible and more values-aligned with these communities.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
I come from engineering and activism, not from academia. This Fellowship has been an incredible opportunity to delve into a professional aspect beyond practitioner, as a researcher with a strong theoretical grounding for my theories of change.

EDGI is a highly intersectional site of work, and it has been an honor to learn from my colleagues over the course of the Fellowship. Our core teams span environmental health, social sciences, geography, and history as fields of work and research. One of our most essential ways of working is through coauthorship, a model that not only allows us to incorporate the nuances and expertise from these many perspectives into our public outputs, but also reflexively trains us as collaborators and researchers to incorporate, for example, social sciences framing into our data work. I am now coediting a thematic collection in Science, Technology, and Human Values on environmental data justice (EDJ, a field first named at EDGI), and coauthoring a chapter in a SAGE handbook also on EDJ. This helps me to more effectively use my data and engineering training to serve communities well.

I am grateful and proud of the Civic Science Fellowship for opening applications to people like me who bring experience from outside of academia. Throughout our program, I was able to advocate for civic science as science *in service of* civics, as a tool designed to empower and enable. Power, including the power of scientific credibility, is never neutral; civic science is and should be engaged, grounded, and controversial.

Project focus: Melanie will pursue her own reporting on civic science for a variety of media outlets whilst also working with colleagues to consider best practice models of conducting civic science journalism. Melanie will help to establish a teaching framework that can be used for both university students and professional journalists to tell civic science stories. Melanie will also be undertaking research into the science media habits of Latinx communities.

About Melanie
Melanie Brown is an award-winning multimedia journalist who will serve as the Civic Science Storytelling Fellow based at the University of Oregon’s Center for Science Communication Research. Melanie has spent the past decade working for the BBC in factual programming with a focus on making science documentaries for the BBC World Service. She is passionate about telling complex science stories in ways that are accessible to a broad audience and foster engagement with the most pressing scientific, environmental, and health issues. Some of her past stories have covered: brain-computer interfaces, China’s scientific development and its implications for geopolitics, wildfires, AI in warfare, underwater noise pollution, memory loss, the future of toilets, and gene editing.  Before retraining as a journalist, Melanie worked in international development in communications and fundraising roles. She cut her teeth meeting communities in rural Afghanistan and sharing their stories to increase awareness around the challenges they faced. This experience helped her foster a people-centered storytelling approach to convey nuanced understandings of development projects in complicated settings.  Melanie holds an M.A. and NCTJ in Multimedia Journalism and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Sussex. Outside of work, Melanie enjoys getting into nature, whether that’s her garden or the great outdoors. She’s often found with a camera poised at some tiny natural wonder, and she is learning to wood carve and kayak; she doesn’t like dill.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My work is focused on considering how science journalism and storytelling can contribute to enhancing the practice and aspirations of civic science. I am doing this by:

• Developing a curriculum and teaching a course on civic science storytelling to science and journalism students
• Reporting on civic science issues here in Oregon (focusing principally on climate change and wildfire)
• Conducting research to understand Oregon’s Latinx population; gathering an understanding of views about science/media habits with an eye to developing science documentaries responding to these insights.
• Building alliances and networks of science practitioners, journalists, academic staff, and communities.
• Considering how to embed science and storytelling skills in communities involved in citizen science work.
• Offering media training to peers and civic science communities.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
Through my teaching, I hope the journalism and science students gain practical tools and critical thinking skills to help them tell scientifically rigorous stories, in an engaging way whilst also bringing in diverse community perspectives. I additionally hope researchers will gain some insight into how involving civic society in research work can enhance their scientific practice and help create a more equitable relationship.

I also wish to raise the profile of civic science itself, so that people outside of academia and science have growing awareness about this important movement.

Ultimately, I hope to make a modest contribution to people feeling that science doesn’t just happen over there but that it is something that is meaningful and feels part of their everyday world. I hope to inspire people with the awe of science, but I also want to empower people to leverage science to improve their well-being and shape their own futures.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
Whilst the decline of local journalism is negatively impacting civic health, it also offers us an opportunity to imagine and reinvent how the local civic information ecology might be better orientated to fulfill the needs of the communities.

I think new forms of journalistic collaborations or coalitions between journalists and civic groups could help fill the civic information gap left by the resource poverty of many local newsrooms. For example, would there be value in giving media training to people involved in citizen science projects and partnering them up with local journalists?

There’s been a lot of great research in the field of science communication. We now need to think about practical ways that this can cascade down into practice. I think this is a really exciting time to think about the different ways for journalists to try and co-create more stories with both local community partners and scientists.

Project focus: Mark, in collaboration with EDGI Civic Science Fellow Kelsey Breseman, will focus on environmental data governance and justice, exploring models for tailoring federal environmental data to the needs of communities.

About Mark
Mark Chambers is a historian who teaches and writes about the intersections between American society, environments and technologies at Stony Brook University, where he earned a Ph.D. in U.S. environmental history. Mark teaches diverse subjects and also reaches non-academic adult audiences through his work with local museums and public institutions that are distinctively situated to transform communities. His forthcoming book, based on his dissertation, “Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1720 to 1840” examines cross-cultural exchanges of knowledge and technology between Native American, European, African, and African American societies in North America since the early eighteenth century, and exemplifies how his training combines scientific and technological knowledge with narrative and storytelling. Recently, Mark has been collaborating on environmental justice issues with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) team of researchers and academics coding interview transcripts of current and recent EPA staff and EJ activists.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
To date, current EPA processes fail to effectively incorporate an important form of public participation in decision-making, and they significantly affect communities bearing the greatest environmental risks. During the past two decades, the environmental justice movement has consistently offered public participation ideas and methods to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), such as community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) to advance the reduction of health disparities (Wilson et al. 2020). Despite decades of continual challenges and increasing attention to environmental justice concerns, these agencies have failed to achieve equity in environmental protection. This failure stems in part from the limitations imposed by the lack of traditional public participation, and the inability of the decision-making process to accommodate the inclusive movement methods.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
It is my hope that the White Paper I am currently working on will advocate for an environmental justice style community-based participatory action research model to approach and recast the role of community participation in environmental decision-making at the Environmental Protection Agency that moves beyond current decision-making paradigms to improve health.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
As a Civic Science Fellow, I have come to see the importance of working across disciplines. That requires going beyond the academy to communities to understand how they define harms, variables, design instruments, and collect data (qualitative and quantitative) to reflect the ecological reality of their communities and their personal experiences. Just as in recent years a number of epidemiologists called for a paradigm shift, arguing that modern epidemiology’s approach of applying a risk-factor paradigm overemphasizes the individual level of risk to the exclusion of other organizational levels of risk, I hope my work now and, in the future, will communicate the importance of embracing these shifts.

Project focus: Martina will work to help understand how to better engage with young people through science journalism, particularly those historically underrepresented in science, including people of color and those in low-income urban and rural areas.

About Martina
Martina G. Efeyini is a toxicologist, science communicator, and STEM education advocate. She is passionate about intersecting STEM, communication, and education to make science accessible for the next generation of scientists. She earned her master’s degree in toxicology from St. John’s University and her bachelor’s degree in toxicology from the Pennsylvania State University. Previously, Martina worked for the UMB CURE Scholars Program. There, she was a College and Career Readiness Coordinator, STEM Expo Manager, and Program Assistant. As a science writer, Martina occasionally writes for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as an alternative career columnist and has written for various professional scientific societies including the Scientista Foundation, the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society for Women Engineers, and Mademoiselle Scientist, her STEM digital platform.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
As a Science News Civic Science Fellow, I use science journalism to engage younger audiences in science. I define younger audiences as Gen Z (specifically teens ages 11–17). This work is important to me, because my goal is to support the next generation of scientists and to make science accessible. To do this, I developed a Science News Toolkit and Guide so newsrooms and interested people can engage younger audiences. Also, a big part of my project, the heart of my project involved having several focus groups with teens. I wanted to have these groups so I could get honest feedback from the teens of today. As teens, they are the experts on teens. It is my goal to use that information to develop a news media product that teens will like and make science accessible as well as engaging. The next step of the project is developing the news media product, beta testing, and doing a report (video) on TikTok, social media, and a written report.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I hope that my work as a Science News Civic Science Fellow inspires people to use civic science in their day-to-day work so they can engage younger audiences. I want them to be inspired to co-create and co-design with others. In addition, I hope to expand my work as a science communicator and STEM education advocate, and civic science for my digital platform TheNextScientist.com. I hope to develop more media products and do more videos so that younger audiences can engage more in science. I plan to continue doing work that supports my values, interests, and skills.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
One insight I’d like to share is the importance of being creative. I am naturally creative, and I want to inject more of my creativity into my work. Whether I’m making a TikTok video about science, my journey, or communication science, I want to do it in a creative way.

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Project focus: Angela will co-design projects, building on work that engages the growing community of practice centering collaborative engagement with communities around science, as well as synthesizing research on timely topics in science communication for practitioner audiences.

About Angela
Angela Fenoglio is a neuroscientist by training and has expertise in brain development, early childhood policy, and prevention science, and she has a longstanding interest in putting science to work to serve the members of our communities who have been systematically disadvantaged. Angela’s work in diverse disciplines and settings has drawn her attention to the gap between the advances being made in the laboratory and the myriad ways that knowledge is (and is not) put to use to address real-world problems. Angela is guided by the belief that translating research into usable knowledge means making it available, accessible, and actionable for stakeholders at all levels and that effective science communication relies on bidirectional, collaborative relationships between researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the communities they aim to serve. Angela holds a Ph.D. in child development from the University of Minnesota, an Ed.M. in human development and education from Harvard University, and a B.A. in psychology from Boston University.

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1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
In my fellowship, I’ve worked with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to increase institutional support for evidence-based science communication and engagement, centering the diverse communities with whom the Academies serve sand partners. Through extensive conversations and surveys, I’ve cataloged the existing community engagement work at the Academies and the challenges project staff have faced in its implementation. I worked with the Standing Committee on Advancing Science Communication to host a free three-day science communication colloquium and facilitated quarterly community engagement meetings with staff from all over the Academies. I’ve built a database of frameworks and goals for community engagement in science and designed an interactive webpage to make information from the colloquium quickly and easily accessible to researchers, practitioners, and anyone interested in learning about community engagement. Broadly, I’ve focused on building networks and identifying and increasing access to resources that support evidence-based, collaborative community engagement in science.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
Throughout my time with the National Academies, I’ve worked to make the insights I’ve encountered available to others within the organization, in hopes that the resources that have so kindly been shared with me will continue to be built upon and shared with others at the Academies (and potentially beyond). I’m also hopeful that the mere existence of the Civic Science Fellowship and the incredible work being done by this warm, compassionate, and highly motivated group of people will help to catalyze the systemic change needed to make science a more inclusive and equitable enterprise.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
With every day I spend in this field, my appreciation for community expertise, knowledge, and wisdom grows. Communities not only know what they need, they know how to access the corners of their own specific spaces that researchers don’t even know to look for. I’m grateful that so many of these communities are still willing to offer time, resources, and trust to organizations deeply embedded in systems that have repeatedly failed them, and it’s our duty to recognize these past failures and really listen when we’re told what we can do better.

Project focus: Andrew will develop a digital platform for fostering effective, sustainable collaborations between scientists and policymakers to address the needs of communities, initially within the state of North Carolina.

About Andrew
Andrew George wants to advance his goal for everyone to have the opportunity to be extraordinary through innovative thinking, creative solutions, and putting people first. Across his career, he has built relationships between Federal agencies, State legislators, students, academic institutions, non-profits, and others to bring about change. As a graduate student, he co-led the development of the North Carolina STEM Policy Fellowship and worked with leadership in his department to standardize pay for graduate students. Andrew previously served as an AAAS Emerging Leaders in Science and Society Fellow, where he engaged stakeholders, practitioners, and users to understand their needs for clean affordable drinking water in North Carolina. Prior to serving as a Civic Science Fellow, Andrew worked as a Senior Consultant and recently as the Executive Vice President for Strategy at Thrivner, Inc. At Thrivner, he worked with leaders looking to make a difference and develop bold initiatives to tackle a range of societal challenges. These included adapting to climate change, creating a sustainable ocean economy, and building resilient communities. In January 2023, Andrew joined the North Carolina Biotechnology Center to design and lead a new Life Sciences Manufacturing Ambassador program. Andrew holds a Ph.D. in Biology from Duke University and a B.S. in Zoology from Michigan State University.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My work focused on developing a digital platform for fostering effective, sustainable collaborations between scientists and policymakers in North Carolina. Through user interviews with policymakers and scientists, I developed a platform that helped scientists understand how to engage with the state-level policy process and find opportunities for them to engage.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I would like to see this platform grow within North Carolina to help create connections between researchers and organizations working at the intersection of science and society. I’d also like it to serve as a template for replication in other states and be modified to allow for engagement at the local level.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
Be open to letting the communities and individuals you want to work with guide the development and direction of the project. Avoid the temptation to stick to the original project description or plan in the face of uncertainty about how to pivot toward a different or more helpful outcome for the community you are working with.

Project focus: Daren will explore how philanthropy can help build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive research enterprise, and what opportunities lie ahead for philanthropists as a growing number recognize the influence of systemic racism and discrimination on their work.

About Daren
Daren R. Ginete is a trained microbiologist with background in infectious diseases, educational content development, and science advising.

Over the years, Daren performed fundamental science research on mechanisms that drive infectious diseases, including how natural toxin reservoirs impact animal biodiversity and evolution. Before that, he worked in healthcare, where he learned how human interactions and cultural attitudes influence the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.

Daren also created diverse educational programs for science communication. For example, he evaluated written materials for scientific content, including a set of stories that highlighted the impact of basic science in the COVID-19 pandemic response (covid19prequels.com). He also produced video tutorials on bioinformatic tools that have generated high viewership and positive responses among researchers and educators.

Recently, as the Infectious Disease Fellow at the Science Philanthropy Alliance, Daren worked on advising projects to increase philanthropic support for basic science research. He also currently serves as the Alliance lead on a shared interest group addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion within science philanthropy.

Daren is excited to be the 2021–23 Civic Science Fellow at the Alliance. Daren received his Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a B.A. in biology from the University of San Diego.

SCIENCE PHILANTHROPY ENGAGEMENT WITH MINORITY-SERVING INSTITUTIONS: THE WHY, HOW, AND WHAT. SCIENCE PHILANTHROPY ALLIANCE BLOG POST:
HTTPS://SCIENCEPHILANTHROPYALLIANCE.ORG/SCIENCE-PHILANTHROPYENGAGEMENT-WITH-MINORITY-SERVING-INSTITUTIONS-THE-WHY-HOW-AND-WHAT/
ONE HEALTH/ONE PLANET: EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE. LEAPS ONLINE MAGAZINE:
HTTPS://ONLINE.FLIPPINGBOOK.COM/VIEW/773676266/
CIVIC SCIENCE SPARKS WITH…THE SCIENCE PHILANTHROPY ALLIANCE. CIVIC SCIENCE BLOG POST:
HTTPS://CIVICSCIENCEFELLOWS.ORG/STORIES/CIVIC-SCIENCE-SPARKS-WITH-THE-SCIENCE-PHILANTHROPY-ALLIANCE
HOW PRIVILEGE INFLUENCES ACCESS AND BIAS IN ACADEMIA. FRANK GATHERING INVITED TALK:
HTTPS://VIMEO.COM/688632652

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My project focuses on responding to the interests of science philanthropy to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion within and through their work. To this end, I provide Science Philanthropy Alliance advisees with tools, information, and support to embed DEI in their operations and grantmaking, grounded on civic engagement with scientific and philanthropic communities.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I am guided by the desire to foster the continued transformation of science grantmaking toward fundamental research for and by all.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
Civic science work can take an extended amount of time and effort. Having a community of practice is important for the sustainability of the work and the well-being of the individuals that do the work.

Project focus: At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Eric is putting “evidence-based science communication” into practice with his multidisciplinary team at the Advanced Visualization Lab. The project is using audience research to inform design choices for cinematic-style scientific visualizations to boost their impact for public audiences.

About Eric
Eric A. Jensen is a Civic Science Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois. Specializing in evidence-based science communication (sciencecomm.science), Eric has 20 years’ of experience in science communication research, evaluation, and practice. He has worked as a consultant and trainer for many research institutions, including the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the National Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the London Zoo, the Science Museum Group, the European Space Agency, CERN, Science Foundation Ireland, Australian Research Data Commons, National Research Foundation (SAASTA), and UNESCO. His recent research has focused on socially responsible science, science festival and public engagement event evaluation, diversity of science communication audiences, and the long-term impact of public engagement and informal learning activities. Eric’s most recently published books are Science Communication: An Introduction (World Scientific) and Doing Real Research: A Practical Guide to Social Research (SAGE). His training courses are featured at methodsforchange.org. His Ph.D. in sociology is from the University of Cambridge.

RESOURCES ABOUT EVIDENCE-BASED SCIENCE COMMUNICATION:
HTTPS://SCIENCECOMM.SCIENCE/
“INTRODUCING CINEMATIC SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION: A NEW FRONTIER IN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION” (LSE IMPACT BLOG):
HTTPS://BLOGS.LSE.AC.UK/IMPACTOFSOCIALSCIENCES/2022/03/16/INTRODUCING-CINEMATIC-SCIENTIFIC-VISUALIZATION-A-NEW-FRONTIER-IN-SCIENCE-COMMUNICATION/
“A NEW FRONTIER IN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION? WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT HOW PUBLIC AUDIENCES RESPOND TO CINEMATIC SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION”—ARTICLE IN FRONTIERS IN COMMUNICATION:
HTTPS://WWW.FRONTIERSIN.ORG/ ARTICLES/10.3389/FCOMM.2022.840631/FULL
SCIENCE COMMUNICATION: AN INTRODUCTION. EDITED VOLUME: HTTPS://WWW.WORLDSCIENTIFIC.COM/WORLDSCIBOOKS/10.1142/11541#T=ABOUTBOOK
TWITTER: @JENSENWARWICK

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My Civic Science Fellow project presents a real-world demonstration of the evidence-based science communication process, showing how it can be used to create scientific data visualizations for public audiences. As with many forms of science communication, creators of such data visualizations typically rely on their own judgments or the views of the scientists providing the data to inform their science communication decision-making. Here, we show the practical steps that our team—the Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—has taken to shift towards more evidence-based practice to enhance our science communication impact. We did this by using quantitative and qualitative audience research to inform our strategies and designs for space science–themed data visualizations (focusing on a new black hole visualization). We have also published the knowledge we gained along the way about “what works and why” with cinematic-style data visualizations for the public.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
It is increasingly recognized that science communication practice (a key dimension of civic science) should be evidence-based. In a paper published the year before starting the fellowship (Jensen & Gerber 2020), I argued for changes in science communication norms and practices, including adapting engagement approaches to audience needs, proactively ensuring the inclusion of marginalized groups, and continually refining practices using insights from robust evaluations and audience research (also see Jensen & Dawson, 2011). This paper outlining an agenda for evidence-based science communication has been widely viewed and cited (approx. 40,000 views and 50+ citations as of early 2023). Yet, we are lacking concrete examples of what evidence-based science communication looks like as a process. This Civic Science Fellow project demonstrates how the Advanced Visualization Lab has implemented evidence-based science communication in the visualization of scientific data for public audiences, offering a roadmap for applying a scientific approach to science communication.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
Taking an evidence-based approach means making communication or visualization design choices not because they are the norm, or because that’s what the designers personally like or prefer to do. Instead, the audience’s needs should be the driving force behind communication choices and visualization design. Don’t assume that what you—or the people you know—like is going to be the right choice for other people, who have different backgrounds, interests, and needs than your social or professional groups. Don’t rely on the opinions of subject-matter experts who have long since forgotten what it was like to encounter a totally unfamiliar scientific topic or who never felt culturally alienated from science. Base your communication choices on evidence about what your target audience cares about, and what makes sense to them.

Project Focus: Lia is investigating how R-1 universities committed to public engagement are collaborating with and meeting the climate policy needs of local sustainability professionals. This effort will yield an inventory of unmet desires among local sustainability professionals across the country and relational findings on collaborations between universities and local governments.

About Lia
Lia Kelinsky-Jones is an interdisciplinary social scientist active in building university-community policy projects and partnerships. Her work focuses on developing more sustainable, just, and climate-resilient communities and food systems. She tends to focus this inquiry within two domains: university engagement and policy. Her dissertation examined the impacts of federal policy on land grant university international development efforts with regard to participation and a sustainable agriculture approach called agroecology. Previously, she led a community-based project to identify policy levers to develop a more climate-resilient food system in the Appalachian region of Virginia. She has over a decade of experience in project and program management at Virginia Tech, where she worked to extend the expertise of the university to the benefit of communities both locally and globally. Personally, she grew up in five different countries and speaks both Spanish and French. She is an avid gardener of both food and flowers and enjoys road and mountain biking in her spare time.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My project began with a mapping of university-based policy engagement. I quickly narrowed the population to R-1 universities that are part of The Research University Engagement Network (TRUCEN). From there, I systematically inventoried all initiatives at each university related to university-based policy engagement. Subsequently, my host and I realized we needed to dive deeper into impact and how these initiatives were meeting local needs. We focused on climate change as all localities experience climate risks, but challenges and resources vary. From there, I identified the sustainability professionals adjacent to TRUCEN universities and conducted elite interviews with 68 percent of that population. During each interview, I collected data on each locality’s top three climate challenges, how research could be useful, and whether they were collaborating with their local TRUCEN university. I also compiled quantitative measures on each locality and school, which we will use to identify relational findings that may explain university-locality climate collaborations.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
At the national level, I hope these findings will help increase and strengthen university-based policy engagement in their local communities around localities’ most pressing needs. Later this year, I will be presenting these findings to TRUCEN universities and engaging in a generative dialogue about how these findings may influence their local collaborations and possibilities for future research. For the field, I hope this encourages scholars interested in policy engagement to investigate the demand for policy engagement and its impact on communities rather than studying the supply side (what activities researchers engage in and with whom). Personally, I hope to build on this work by investigating local government food policy actors and their climate needs in the future. Local governments are increasingly adding positions focused on community food systems, but we know little about climate action and needs among such actors.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
90 percent of sustainability professionals have climate change needs not being met by their local R-1 university.

Project focus: Based at Science, Media, and the Public Research Group at the University of Wisconsin­–Madison, Nicole will work to understand interactions between scientific information and human values in polarized cultures and examine how the science of science communication can help develop more effective strategies for communities of practice to connect with conservative and/or religious audiences.

About Nicole
Nicole Krause is a social scientist in the Life Sciences Communication department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her Civic Science Fellowship project asks: How can we use the “science of science communication” to develop more effective strategies to meaningfully connect with conservative, religious, and rural audiences? Nicky’s work focuses on communication dynamics surrounding emerging science and technology, especially topics that have complex ethical, legal, and societal implications, such as human gene editing or artificial intelligence. Her research examines ways to minimize forms of biased information processing that can inhibit the deliberation of such topics among people with different value systems and identities. Nicky also researches misinformation as an aspect of science communication environments, including the related topic of trust in science. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Communication, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, New Media & Society, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Journal of Risk Research, among other outlets. Outside of academia, Nicky has worked as a researcher, designer, and project manager in the healthcare communication and software industries, as well as on civic technology initiatives at 18F, a technology consultancy within the federal government.

HTTPS://JOURNALS.SAGEPUB.COM/DOI/FULL/10.1177/09636625221147232
HTTPS://WWW.SCIENCEDIRECT.COM/SCIENCE/ARTICLE/PII/S0264410X22015705
HTTPS://CIVICSCIENCEFELLOWS.ORG/STORIES/CIVIC-SCIENCE-SPARKS-WITH-SCIENCE-MEDIA-AND-THE-PUBLIC-RESEARCH-GROUP/
HTTPS://IL.BOELL.ORG/EN/2022/02/03/DEESCALATING-POLARIZATION-WILL-CONTRIBUTE-DIMINISHING-PROBLEMMISINFORMATION

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My project addresses the topic of polarization related to science, with a specific emphasis on understanding why rural, religious, and politically conservative groups are sometimes “misaligned” with science. A key focus of my work so far has been to examine existing answers to this question in relevant academic literature and to identify underdeveloped areas that may be limiting what we understand about the nature of science polarization and possible solutions. The results of this effort are a series of in-progress research papers that outline and begin to empirically address three aspects of science polarization phenomena that require more focused research attention and action: 1) Theoretical and empirical attention to “science-aligned” social groups, as they engage in processes of social comparison and contrast with science-misaligned groups; 2) Examination of how forms of support for science can contribute to social intolerance or possibly inhibit productive science deliberation when it reaches the level of a moral conviction; and 3) Greater examination of “moderate” groups who exist outside of “pro-science” vs. “anti-science” discourse, and who can be “pushed away” from science engagement to avoid social conflict or bickering. My papers demonstrate the empirical value of filling these research gaps by drawing on data from a national survey I fielded in February 2022. In the remaining six months of this fellowship, I will be using data from a second survey to work with partner organizations in order to identify avenues for productive messaging that can bridge science divides among the relevant groups.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I hope that my work can complicate some existing conversations about science polarization that have characterized group divides in science issue contexts in epistemological terms and which have focused on groups who are skeptical of the “facts” or who are otherwise motivated to reject the scientific consensus. While there is merit to much of this work, and while some of its insights are well-rooted in (social) psychology, it is not the only lens by which we could explain science polarization, and a failure to broaden our horizons would be not only myopic but also perilous. If we conceive of science polarization (even implicitly) as divides between people who believe the facts and people who don’t, it can be difficult to imagine that someone can “believe the facts” too much, which means we will be less likely to ask about the beliefs and behaviors of people who tend in a normatively desirable direction—i.e., people who align with science. As some polls indicate that trust in science is spiking to historically high levels among some groups, and as my own data are showing that some subgroups now believe it is immoral to distrust scientists, it will be important to ask whether these attitudes are democratically desirable and what role ideological shifts among science supporters might be playing in science polarization. By suggesting this, I don’t mean to “blame” ardent science supporters for science polarization. I am saying we need data and that we should be more critically reflexive about science alignment.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
My work has shown that, when using Independents as a reference, Democrat identification is a strong, positive predictor of trust in science, while Republican identification has no effect, providing some evidence that gaps in “trust in science” among partisans could be usefully explained by increasing support for science among Democrats, more so than declines among Republicans. To many, this is possibly an unsurprising finding, and it is consistent with some previous work. However, what I found interesting is that divergent effects across the partisan groups do appear—i.e., partisans’ attitudes do move in opposite directions—when Americans are asked whether they agree that it is immoral to distrust scientists. When the question is not about a willingness to trust scientists but rather about the moralization of trust in scientists, then Democrats and Republicans really are in conflict. To me, this suggests that some of our most pressing science polarization problems might not be epistemological questions of whether, for example, conservatives are refusing to accept the validity or legitimacy of scientists’ truth-claims. Instead, the locus of disagreement might have more to do with disputes over the value of science in society and/or whether it is a moral imperative to support it.

Project focus: Álvaro will explore narrative, traditional culture, nature, and tech to identify ways to illuminate and protect the wonders of the world.

About Álvaro
Álvaro Laiz is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, text, video, and sound. His research-based work deals with narratives where traditional culture, nature, and technology converge. Álvaro’s work has been recognized and funded by a number of institutions including National Geographic, Sony World Photography Awards, World Press Photo, and Magnum Foundation.

HTTP://WWW.ALVAROLAIZ.COM/THE-EDGE

Interactive Exhibit Site (click for link):

Project focus: Andrea will help to evaluate the impact of CienciaPR’s culturally relevant strategies across programs, understand how CienciaPR’s work can be a model to advance civic science, and strategize to increase the organization’s capacity to train more scientists in culturally relevant strategies and foster civic participation.

About Andrea
Andrea Isabel López serves as the Civic Science Fellow for CienciaPR. Andrea holds an MPH in Community Health from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. She completed the Margaret E. Mahoney Fellowship with the New York Academic of Medicine, where she explored barriers to care in the Latino community and the role of community health workers. Andrea has also worked as a Research Project Coordinator and Associate Researcher for multiple NIH-funded projects based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Andrea has over five years of experience in different areas of the research and public health fields, including community-based participatory research, clinical research, and project management. She is the recipient of an NIH research supplement to promote diversity in health-related research programs and the Gilman Scholar Scholarship. Andrea was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and is committed to advancing health equity for the Latino community and improving representation in the research field. Andrea proudly carries her cultural background and believes that engaging the public, especially underserved communities, in a meaningful way through the research process is an essential component in advancing all research. Some of her research interests include: social determinants of health, civic science, and community-based participatory research.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
As a Civic Science Fellow, I evaluated the impact of Ciencia Puerto Rico’s communication strategies and developed a tool to increase the capacity to train scientists in culturally relevant communication strategies. The two deliverables I worked on were a paper exploring the impact of CienciaPR’s culturally relevant science communication and a workbook to walk researchers and communicators through the practice of reflexivity.

For the paper, we explored the impact of CienciaPR’s collaboration with El Nuevo Día (END), the newspaper of record in Puerto Rico. CienciaPR established a collaboration with the newspaper to publish culturally relevant science stories written by members of the CienciaPR network. The findings indicate that these contributions increased the amount of culturally relevant articles published in END. Articles authored by CienciaPR were also more likely to feature elements that are culturally relevant for Puerto Ricans, be authored by STEM experts, and were more frequently located in Puerto Rico.

The reflexivity workbook provides an overview of reflexivity and how researchers and communicators can integrate it into their practice. For context, reflexivity is a process where we are making an active effort to be self-aware and reflect on our identities and positionalities and the identities and positionalities of anyone who might influence or impact our work. This process also requires an understanding of what motivates our work and what influences us to engage with it. The workbook includes guiding questions and exercises to help readers navigate this process through the different stages of their work.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I hope my work as a fellow will showcase Puerto Rican scientists and their contributions to science and the importance of incorporating a reflexive approach to our work.

As part of my evaluation of Ciencia Puerto Rico’s collaboration with El Nuevo Dia (END), I highlighted the value of this scientist-media partnership and how it has improved the representation of locally relevant science in Puerto Rican media. CienciaPR’s contributions to END have made science more accessible and approachable for Puerto Ricans, showcased Puerto Rican contributions to science, and highlighted the archipelago as a location of significant contributions to scientific knowledge. These efforts help counter stereotypes about who can be a scientist and where research is conducted. This study is also the first analysis of culturally relevant science content in mainstream Puerto Rican media. I’m hopeful it will be the first of many similar reviews and will serve as a basis for continuing to support this work and Puerto Rican science.

When it comes to incorporating a reflexive approach to our work, during my fellowship, I developed a reflexivity workbook. The goal of this workbook is to provide researchers and communicators with a place to start their reflexivity practice. While reflexivity has a proven track record in fields like public health and anthropology, it is not yet a mainstream practice for science communicators. There is also limited information and training materials available for reflexivity beginners. This workbook hopes to address this gap and turn reflexivity into a common practice for science communicators.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
Reflexivity is an empathy and humility tool that can impact how we relate with others, even outside of our work. During my time as a Civic Science Fellow, I had the privilege of focusing on reflexivity and how to communicate it to different audiences. I started my work with a literature review of existing resources and then moved on to develop a reflexivity workbook. As part of the formative work, I also interacted with different people who helped me review the content for the workbook and whose opinions helped shape the final product. During this time, I also prioritized practicing reflexivity as part of developing the workbook. Few people have the opportunity to immerse themselves in reflexivity full-time and understand how to use this tool and communicate its effectiveness. After spending months exploring reflexivity, I find myself practicing it on a regular basis, especially in my day-to-day life outside of work. I find that I interact with people with a lot more humility and empathy and am a much better listener. And while I was familiar with reflexivity and knew how to practice it in my work, I wasn’t expecting to see it impact my life outside the fellowship.

Project focus: In collaboration with the Health Research Alliance, Eunice will work toward increasing both openness and equity within funding programs by helping to develop, launch, and oversee an Open and Equitable Model Funding Program to address inequities in the research community.

About Eunice
Eunice Mercado-Lara is the Civic Science Fellow at the Open Research Funders Group. She leads the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program, a research funders community of practice to pilot interventions to make grantmaking practices more equitable and to incentivize open and collaborative scholarly practices. Over the last eight years, she has worked mainly in the public sector to help funding agencies and universities align incentives and policies to advance open research. Eunice 23 served as a board and committee member in several international organizations and initiatives advocating for openness, such as CERN’s SCOAP3 initiative, the Open Access Week, and the OpenCon LATAM.

HTTPS://WWW.OPENANDEQUITABLE.ORG/

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
I worked at the Open Research Funders Group to develop a program for research funders to pilot interventions in their grant-making processes to make research funding more inclusive and positively impact research culture by incentivizing open scholarship practices and further collaboration among grantees.

The Open & Equitable Model Funding Program offers a set of 32 recommendations for research funders, all of which were jointly built with a Working Group that includes representatives from four research funding philanthropies, scholars, scientists, and activists working at the intersection of open research and marginalized communities.

The program also gathered a cohort of 11 pioneer research funders that are road-testing these recommendations and sharing lessons learned in real time during the cohort’s monthly sessions. We want to create actionable knowledge for the broader science philanthropic community so that any research funder can benefit from this pilot. This is why all our recommendations and templates are publicly available on our website for anyone to read, download, or comment on.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
Perhaps the most powerful tool research funders have to make a change is the dollars they invest through their funding mechanisms. My work as a fellow developing the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program created a tool that most of the members of the philanthropic science community trying to embed equity principles throughout all the stages of their grantmaking processes can benefit from since it provides actionable and road-tested recommendations that go from program design, inclusive dissemination of funding opportunities, more equitable ways to support applicants and grantees, etc., and also on how to incentivize and support open scholarship practices to promote more transparent and collaborative research culture.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
In philanthropy, openness and inclusion help build trust with stakeholders and enable organizations to demonstrate the impact of their work. In society, openness promotes accountability and good governance and helps create an environment where all individuals can participate and contribute to creating locally relevant solutions.

Increasing collaboration and openly sharing information and resources in the scientific enterprise usually leads to greater efficiency, better decision-making, and the ability to build upon existing knowledge. Openness also encourages inclusivity and diversity of perspectives, which leads to more innovative ideas and solutions.

This is why science philanthropy must incorporate these values among their organizational priorities; however, throughout my fellowship, I realized most of the recommendations require funding organizations to add more resources and capacities to undertake these additional activities. Science philanthropies usually need to find the right balance between spending money to cover operational costs or spending it to fund more research proposals to solve the challenges they were created for. This healthy tension makes it crucial for science philanthropies to be more efficient and collectively identify challenges and solutions instead of duplicating the work by doing it individually. Such as we did in the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program.

Video (click for link):

Project focus: Julia will focus on understanding the conditions that make people willing to listen and be receptive to views and opinions they strongly oppose on political and social topics related to science.

About Julia
Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is a decision scientist with research interests in conflict, negotiations and judgment, and decision-making. Her primary line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement”—How do people engage with opinions, judgments, and decisions that are different from their own?

She explores this theme in the context of group decision-making to uncover the psychological biases that prevent managers, consumers, and policymakers from maximizing the benefits of collaboration. She also studies the conditions that make people willing to listen and be receptive to views and opinions they strongly oppose on political and social topics.

Much of Julia’s research is conducted in collaboration with the graduate and post-doctoral members of MC²—the Minson Conflict and Collaboration Lab. At the Kennedy School, Julia is affiliated with the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Center for Public Leadership. Julia teaches courses on negotiations and decision-making as part of the Management, Leadership, and Decision Science area, as well as through HKS Executive Education.

Julia is the organizer of the Leadership Influence and Decision-Making speaker series, sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership and the Management Leadership and Decision Sciences Area.

Prior to coming to the Kennedy School, Julia served as a Lecturer at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she taught Negotiations at both the MBA and the undergraduate levels. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University and her B.A. in Psychology from Harvard University.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
My broad research program explores the “psychology of disagreement”—how people can engage with opposing views on strongly held, identity-relevant attitudes. For my Civic Science Fellowship, I conducted a series of experiments testing whether “conversational receptiveness”—the use of specific words and phrases to demonstrate your engagement with opposing views—can improve conversations about COVID-19 vaccines.

For these studies, we paired up vaccine-supportive and vaccine-opposing participants and engaged them in online communication. We randomly assigned half of the vaccine-supportive participants to receive training in conversational receptiveness, while the other half received instructions to use their natural communication style to be as persuasive as possible.

We found that in interactions where one person was trained in conversational receptiveness, both sides evaluated their counterpart and the conversation more positively. They thought the other person was more reasonable and trustworthy, and they were more willing to interact with them in the future. In another study, we found that learning about conversational receptiveness increased participants’ willingness to talk to someone who disagrees with them about the COVID-19 vaccines by 50 percent.

The studies above have now been written up and submitted for peer review. They have also laid the foundation for a broader program of research looking at the effect of conversational receptiveness training in healthcare settings.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
Healthcare workers across almost every field have been stretched to the limit of their physical and psychological endurance by the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with terrified patients and ongoing staffing shortages, providers have seen increased conflict and incivility at work ranging from verbal abuse to physical assault. Conversational receptiveness offers a theoretically grounded and empirically validated toolkit to prevent conflict escalation in the face of disagreement. Although the work was initiated around vaccine conversations, we are now applying the same approach to discussions around antibiotic use and emergency care.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
My experience working on this project has further reaffirmed my commitment to developing and rigorously testing interventions to improve civil discourse around hot-button topics. Reviewing the literature on medical communication revealed how few evidence-based tools exist for physicians who must engage with patients on controversial topics and how great the need is for more of those tools. I am glad that this opportunity allowed for the development and testing of our intervention, and I hope that it will come to be broadly applied and inspire other related work.

Project focus: Michelle will help design, implement, and evaluate a novel engagement program involving an underrepresented or marginalized community.

About Michelle
Michelle Race is the Civic Science Fellow for Advancing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Public Engagement at ScienceCounts. Michelle is a science communicator with over five years of experience creating and facilitating educational programs for K-12 and adult audiences. She is passionate about working with her community and is the co-founder of the outdoor recreation group Black Girls Trekkin’. Michelle received a B.S. in Marine Biology from San Diego State University and also holds an M.A. in Biology from Miami University, OH with a focus on connecting underrepresented communities to environmental science and the outdoors. Outside of work, Michelle enjoys listening to podcasts, reading, and learning to sew her own clothes.

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
The focus of my work has been to gain a better understanding of how underrepresented communities, specifically Black and Latino communities, want to participate in science. The two most notable aspects of my work have been my contribution to the analysis of a national survey about motivations and barriers to science engagement, as well as the launch of my own project Science Engaged LA. The goal of this project, and my work overall, is to make science more welcoming and accessible for historically marginalized communities.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I hope that practitioners are able to use the results of my work in actionable ways to improve their science engagement strategies. As a field, I hope that the work I have contributed to can be used as a foundation to keep learning about how to create better experiences for communities that have historically been excluded from science.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
One major takeaway from my work that continues to resonate with me is what we learned about the barriers to science engagement that impact Black and Latino communities. In addition to clear statements of barriers that relate to feelings of belonging and identity, we found that major barriers still exist for people who choose to participate. It is a reminder to me that success in dismantling barriers can’t just be measured by who is participating, but that success requires deep listening to ensure that barriers to engagement are truly being addressed.

Project focus: Jylana will co-design and co-manage the “Our Future is Science” initiative in close partnership with the Aspen Institute and Coda Societies to spark passion, confidence, and curiosity about science for highschool-aged Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

About Jylana
Jylana L. Sheats, Ph.D., MPH, is a behavior scientist with advanced training in public health and behavioral medicine. A researcher, practitioner, educator, and thought leader, Jylana has designed a career where she provides cross-sector guidance on the science and design of health behavior change solutions; equitable community engagement and participatory approaches; inclusive science communication; social innovation; and STEAM diversity. She was a 2021–23 Civic Science Fellow with the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program. Committed to advancing science and equipping the next generation of scientists, healthcare/ public health practitioners, and scholars, Jylana is a Clinical Associate Professor at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine; and Associate Director of the Aspen Institute Science and Society Program. Well-published and an international speaker, Jylana’s individual and collaborative efforts have been documented via book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and new media. Her professional efforts have been recognized via receipt of research honors and awards such as the Dr. Tony A. Mobley International Distinguished Alumni Award from Indiana University–Bloomington’s School of Public Health; a National Institutes of Health’s Building Research Careers in Women’s Health award; an NIH Obesity and Health Disparities Programs to Increase Diversity Among Individuals Engaged in Health-Related Research (PRIDE) award; and multiple Inspire leadership awards in her capacity as a former corporate behavior scientist at Johnson & Johnson. A graduate of Spelman College, Jylana also has degrees from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Indiana University–Bloomington. She completed her postdoctoral training in behavioral medicine at Stanford School of Medicine.

PROGRAM WEBSITE—OUR FUTURE IS SCIENCE:
HTTPS://OURFUTUREISSCIENCE.ORG/
CIVIC SCIENCE SPARKS:
HTTPS://CIVICSCIENCEFELLOWS.ORG/STORIES/CIVIC-SCIENCE-SPARKS-WITH-THE-ASPEN-INSTITUTEAND-CODA-SOCIETIES/
DISMANTLING THE SILOS:
HTTPS://WWW.ASPENINSTITUTE.ORG/BLOG-POSTS/DISMANTLING-THE-SILOS/
ONE HEALTH / ONE PLANET DIGITAL MAGAZINE (CO-EDITOR):
HTTPS://ONLINE.FLIPPINGBOOK.COM/VIEW/773676266/
DISCOVER DISCOVERY:
HTTPS://DISCOVERDISCOVERY.COM/
FRANK 2022 TALK—WHY LIVED EXPERIENCE MATTERS:
HTTPS://VIMEO.COM/685937438
NATIONAL ACADEMIES PANEL—BUILDING A CULTURE OF CIVIC SCIENCE AT THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES SCIENCE COMMUNICATION COLLOQUIUM:
HTTPS://CIVICSCIENCEFELLOWS.ORG/STORIES/BUILDING-A-CULTURE-OF-CIVIC-SCIENCE-NAS-2022/
COMMUNICATION & STORYTELLING PART I: CIVIC SCIENCE FELLOWS MARTINA EFEYINI & DR. JYLANA L. SHEATS:
HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=K77KPHHPDLY
COMMUNICATION & STORYTELLING PART II: CIVIC SCIENCE FELLOWS MARTINA EFEYINI & DR. JYLANA L. SHEATS:
HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=EOKKBIZDNNI

OTHER ASPEN WORK COMPLETED DURING THE FELLOWSHIP:
IN FAVOR OF PURE SCIENCE REPORT
HTTPS://WWW.ASPENINSTITUTE.ORG/WP-CONTENT/UPLOADS/2022/09/PURE-SCIENCEASPEN-INSTITUTE-2022.PDF
A BLUEPRINT FOR EQUITABLE AI:
HTTPS://WWW.ASPENINSTITUTE.ORG/PUBLICATIONS/BLUEPRINT-FOR-EQUITABLE-AI/
CLINICAL TRIAL DIVERSITY: ADVANCING SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND EQUITY (FORTHCOMING)

RELEVANT WORK COMPLETED DURING THE FELLOWSHIP:
OUR VOICE NOLA: LEVERAGING A COMMUNITY ENGAGED CITIZEN SCIENCE METHOD TO CONTEXTUALIZE THE NEW ORLEANS FOOD ENVIRONMENT:
HTTPS://WWW.MDPI.COM/1660-4601/19/22/14790
CLIMATE CHANGE & YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH
HTTPS://SEECHANGEINSTITUTE.COM/SCI_PROJECT/CLIMATECHANGEANDYOUTHMENTALHEALTH/

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
As a Civic Science Fellow, I played a key role in designing Our Future is Science (OFIS), an initiative of the Aspen Institute Science and Society program, which was my host institution, and Coda Societies. The initiative is composed of a near-peer leadership mentorship forum and an educational campaign that both centers on connecting science and social justice. The idea for OFIS was born out of the need to address many of the well-documented barriers to STEM for underserved, historically marginalized, rural and low-income students. Our team has created a mechanism that draws upon students’ cultural funds of knowledge to develop deep and meaningful linkages between STEM, their lived experiences, and social justice. With regard to the mentorship forum, we pair high schooler mentees from across the U.S. with graduate STEM student mentors—also across the U.S. To date, we’ve had over 500 students apply to the program—and accepted 110 students across our two cohorts. As part of the program, we designed a STEM-social justice modular curriculum implemented by the mentors in their bi-weekly mentorship team meetings, hosted monthly professional development workshops, as well as a monthly community talk series where we feature scientists from an underrepresented race or ethnicity and an activist or someone in a science-adjacent career who are both working at the intersection of science and a social justice issue—but in different, yet complimentary ways. The community talks are open to the public, our program alumni, whom we call Ambassadors, and Scholars, who are students that applied to OFIS, but are unable to fully participate due to programmatic capacity. To reach the masses, we have an educational campaign that asks students from across the U.S. to respond, by video, to the prompt: how could science solve a problem in your community? This campaign runs about two times per year and with each iteration, we’ve awarded the most creative, compelling, and innovative ideas with cash prizes and scholarships.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I am excited for Our Future is Science to continue inspiring and equipping the next generation of STEM leaders with knowledge and ability to use science as a tool to address social justice issues. We are all intersectional beings with each young person in our OFIS network—whether a mentor, mentee, Ambassador, or Scholar, being equipped with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to speak confidently about the connections between science and social justice and act in a way that leads to societal change.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow? When I accepted the invitation to be a Civic Science Fellow, I made a personal vow to fully immerse myself in the position, engage in or lead opportunities that were afforded to us, and maintain a growth mindset—even when experiencing challenges. I can confidently say that I have accomplished my goal and want to continue on this trajectory as I am a better person for it. I encourage future fellows to do the same.

Video (click for link):

Project focus: Claire will focus on public engagement in the ethics of emerging research and development in neuroscience at the National Informal STEM Education (NISE) Network, working with collaborators to develop pilot engagement, directions for the future, and pathways to policymaker engagement.

About Claire
Claire Weichselbaum serves as the Dana Foundation Barbara Gill Civic Science Fellow at the National Informal STEM Education Network, based at Arizona State University. She is a scientist and science educator with over 10 years of experience creating, implementing, and evaluating STEM programs and learning materials. Claire was a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Institutes of Health and holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. Her academic research focused on the neural basis of social development in young children and animal models. During graduate school, she co-founded a science outreach program called Brain Discovery, bringing inquiry based neuroscience experiences to more than 1500 young students. Claire has developed curricula for preschoolers through graduate students and served organizations including Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, the St. Louis Science Center, and Encyclopedia Britannica. She is committed to educating, inspiring, and empowering people of all ages and backgrounds to be active participants in the future of science.

THE NEUROETHICS ENGAGEMENT TOOLS DEVELOPED DURING MY FELLOWSHIP WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE HERE—
WWW.NISENET.ORG/BRAIN

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
During my fellowship, I developed public engagement tools to encourage reflection and dialogue about the ethical and societal implications of neuroscience research and neurotechnology, with input from scientists, ethicists, educators, and policy experts. Although these engagement experiences were piloted and evaluated in science museums, I’m excited by their potential for use in a wide variety of other contexts to create opportunities for multidirectional learning among diverse stakeholders and communities.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
The development of these neuroethics engagement activities is just the beginning! In addition to applying these tools in other settings, from professional meetings to graduate ethics trainings to K–12 classrooms, I hope this approach can serve as a model for bringing together many perspectives on the societal impacts of scientific research. Personally, this fellowship has provided an incredible opportunity to work with others who are passionate about civic science, and I hope to continue learning and growing with all of you in the future.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
Everyone has something to contribute to science—you don’t have to be an expert to share your values, your lived experience, your fears and hopes for the future. Too often scientists believe that the general public can only participate in these conversations if they’re given extensive background information. But my neuroethics engagement work has shown that people are able and eager to discuss complex issues when provided with accessible, engaging opportunities to make their voices heard.

Project focus: Emelia will focus on the open data and governance ecosystem, working collaboratively to identify and articulate new strategies for data usability, governance, and inclusiveness in practice.

About Emelia
Emelia Williams (she/they) is a public policy researcher with expertise in how citizens and government respond to environmental, energy, and climate crises. Currently, she is the Policy and Research Associate at the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP), where she is working to translate policy and research on environmental data to inform civic pilots and prototypes. She is particularly interested in learning how to design more inclusive systems for community use of environmental data and using futures-thinking to imagine a better environment (physically, socially, politically). She has held research roles spanning the gamut of environmental topics including deep decarbonization, clean energy access, and proforestation at MIT, the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Sustainable Energy for All. Emelia completed a master’s degree in environmental and climate policy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental science and international studies from Centre College.

OPPORTUNITY AND DESIGN BRIEF RESEARCH: HTTPS://WWW.OPENENVIRONMENTALDATA.ORG/RESEARCH-TYPE/ OPPORTUNITY-BRIEFS PUBLICATION IN FRONTIERS IN CLIMATE: HTTPS://WWW.FRONTIERSIN.ORG/ARTICLES/10.3389/FCLIM.2022.785269/FULL
BRIEF ON DIGITAL RIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE JUSTICE: HTTPS://WWW.FORDFOUNDATION.ORG/MEDIA/7342/ OEDP-AND-OC-ENVIROMENTAL_01-07-22.PDF

1. What was the focus of your work as a Civic Science Fellow? What did you do?
The focus of my work as a Civic Science Fellow was to research and model systems for community
governance. I designed a research plan, organized Brain Trusts (focus groups), led interviews,
performed desk research, and synthesized this information into four opportunity briefs over the
course of the fellowship. The topics included environmental data as a public good, local planning and
environmental data as civic voice, using data beyond original intent, and collaboratively managed data.
I worked on and eventually sunsetted OEDP’s work with SIDE events. I added to our conceptualization
of a community governance model called Community Data Hubs, and fundraised $100k to continue
the work with partners, coordinating a working group, and leading design sessions. I also completed
research on digital rights and data reusability for environmental and climate justice communities.

2. How do you hope your work as a Fellow will influence the future—for yourself, an organization, a community, or a field?
I hope my work added to the nascent field of environmental data with several original research pieces and hopefully, the continuation of a community of practice. I hope that the ideas that I have socialized in research and network building will take root in the policy culture of the field. I hope my work furthered the mission of Open Environmental Data Project, especially in demystifying data as a powerful source of evidence for communities and their interactions with local decision makers, and that ultimately, environmental and climate injustices are addressed with policy and action that leverages open environmental data. My work as a fellow has influenced my future in that I have expanded my areas of knowledge, my understanding of the intersections of multiple fields, and grown my own personal network. I have learned about ways I can apply creative methods to tried and true policy methods to see what kind of futures we can design.

3. What’s one insight you’d share from your work as a Civic Science Fellow?
Responding to overwhelming and complex issues is always easier with a team of people who all think a little bit differently.