Meet the Civic Science Associates

Project: Examining Civic Science Case Studies: Emily will create a comprehensive case study and ideas reservoir, highlighting and analyzing effective civic science engagement initiatives, showcasing the breadth of civic science work, and providing insight to enhance practices across diverse contexts.

Em is a Civic Science Associate based at Rockefeller University (RockEdu) in New York City. She completed her Ph.D. studying lung cancer biology at Sloan Kettering and has explored her interests in science communication all throughout graduate school, namely through her involvement in ComSciCon, running a science comedy show and podcast, journalistic and creative science writing, and volunteering with New York’s many wonderful science outreach organizations. Motivated by her biomedical science and science communication backgrounds, she’s especially interested in civic science surrounding ethics, accessibility, and disparities in clinical and genetics research and practice.

Project: Supporting Diverse and Ethical Computer Scientists: Fiona is conducting her research into the U.S. student support system, particularly that at UC-San Diego, and understanding how it can be translated to the UK to create a generation of diverse and ethical computer scientists.

Fiona is a Reader of Computing Education and Director of Students in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and practice focus on inclusive computing and STEM education: how can we bring more people from diverse backgrounds into these teaching environments, and how can we make these environments engaging and supportive to diverse people once they are there? Computing traditionally has very poor diversity, with very significant gender, race and socioeconomic inequality, amongst others. Fiona’s work focusses on several questions around these problems—for example, how addressing stereotypes around what computing is and what careers in it look like can foster engagement amongst groups of people who are socialised to believe it is not for them, and how building inclusive and supportive environments in computing environments can combat people’s sense of not belonging. She also does work around how government policy can support greater engagement from broad demographics with computing and STEM within schools.