Stories

Civic Science Fellow Elyse Aurbach rewires how universities value public engagement

Fresh out of college, Elyse Aurbach worked as a research assistant to renowned neuroscientist and author, David Eagleman. Inspired by his dedication to science communication, Aurbach hoped to follow his example. But as a graduate student in neuroscience, she couldn’t see a clear path to reach that goal.

“There was no one at the University of Michigan at the time who could teach me how to be like David,” she says.

So she built what didn’t exist, co-founding RELATE, a graduate-led training program focused on effective communication and public engagement. Eventually, she faced a career-defining choice. “After I graduated with my Ph.D., I was trying to both teach science communication and be a full-time researcher and realized that I couldn’t do both,” she says. “I had to choose.”

She opted for communication. Her Civic Science Fellowship with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) has helped her define her own path toward that goal. Now, as assistant provost at Michigan State University, she’s working to widen that path for others by drawing on the insights from her Fellowship project, which created a comprehensive roadmap for transforming how the more than 250 public research universities in the United States recognize and reward civic science.

“I’m a neuroscientist and public engagement professional who loves higher education,” Aurbach says. “And I also want to see colleges and universities evolve to better intersect with society.”

The architecture of change

Aurbach’s Fellowship project, which she completed while also working at the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan, had three components: an expansive literature review across multiple fields, case studies of university change efforts, and deliberate network-building with other institutional change initiatives.

The case studies revealed both possibility and complexity. At the University of Arizona, she documented a decades-long transformation that overhauled how the university recruited, recognized, and promoted faculty to better recognize and support community-engaged scholarship and the institution’s efforts to more effectively serve Hispanic and Native communities. The changes addressed everything from bylaws to culture, providing an example for how universities can evolve their deepest structures.

The University of Missouri held listening sessions in every county in the state to try to understand what the community wants from the university system. That work resulted in research initiatives in areas including broadband support and precision health that had direct ties to community-articulated priorities. “This is the type of thing that I find inspirational,” Aurbach says.

Through studying these transformations, Aurbach developed a key insight. “Everything is contextual,” she says. “Each campus is a unique ecosystem with different strengths, opportunities, and readiness for change.” Rather than prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions, she created a database of over 50 concrete actions academic leaders can take, organized by institutional role and readiness level.

The resulting report, “Modernizing Scholarship for the Public Good,” published by the APLU, offers strategies in eight action areas, developed through engagement with nearly 60 experts at 20 universities. “Working with APLU on this initiative has been a highlight of my career,” Aurbach says.

One important take-away from this work is that structural challenges to change at universities run deep, and following through to implementation can be difficult, Aurbach says. “Many change efforts fall apart because creating change is, generally speaking, nobody’s job.”

Universities tend to fall back on long-standing systems of evaluating faculty by the amounts of papers published, books published, and grant dollars secured. But this system is incomplete in a lot of ways. Policy citations often don’t count, nor do other types of documents that highlight community. “If we’re just evaluating my individual portfolio, then that discounts an awful lot, including all the work of my community partners.”

Through her fellowship, Aurbach identified key ingredients for successful systemic change, including a dedicated champion with power to allocate resources, proper resourcing for both the change and the process itself, and clear vision about “what you’re trying to accomplish, why, and how.”

“Change is hard,” she says. “It requires people to unlearn and relearn. It requires people to sometimes give up things to which they’ve held tightly for years in order to embrace new things…which may or may not be welcome.”

Disruption and opportunity

The connections that grew out of her Fellowship have been transformative. “The network that APLU gave me access to was second to none, full stop,” Aurbach says. “I have gotten opportunities because of my fellowship that it’s hard for me to imagine that I ever would have gotten without it.” This includes her recent appointment to a National Academies standing committee.

Her recent move to Michigan State reflects her evolution. “Because MSU is a land-grant institution, it prioritizes a lot of the values that we’ve been talking about,” she says. “I fit better at a land-grant institution.”

Still, the many challenges facing institutions these days—funding crises, policy shifts, AI creeping into processes and assessments—feel daunting, Aurbach says. “You can throw a dart to try and choose which major disruptive force you want to tackle.” The AI issue in particular concerns her. “There are tools being piloted that use GenAI to predict the impact of something like a grant portfolio,” she says. “Which gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

But she also sees an upside. “With forced disruption, we also have an opportunity to try and work towards a better future, and maybe not be stuck in the shackles of the status quo. I find that exciting,” Aurbach says. “If I didn’t find that exciting, I would find all the disruption so heavy that I wouldn’t be able to move.”

The progress she’s witnessed gives her hope. When she was starting out, civic science infrastructure didn’t exist, but that is changing fast. “It’s much more accepted as an early career researcher, as a grad student, as a postdoc, to use these types of methodologies,” she says. There are degree programs at multiple universities, training through scientific societies, certificate programs. “The landscape has really shifted over the last 20 years.”

The potential for the civic science approach to meet this moment also inspires Aurbach. “Even in the face of all of the headwinds, people are still looking to one another for fellowship, and to solve mutual problems with thoughtful, co-creative, fair, resource-distributed approaches. And I see that accelerating.”

The strength of civic science is rooted in the diversity of experience it brings to bear on challenges facing society, as embodied by the Fellowship. “Part of what’s powerful about the Civic Science Fellowship is its heterogeneity,” Aurbach says. “Somebody like me, who is an institutional change wonk and scholar, can have an experience alongside someone who’s interested in neuro-organoids and ethics. That is so powerful.”

One way to accelerate adoption of the approach would be to offer resources and training beyond people early in their career, she says. “If one of the missions of the Civic Science Fellowship program is to enable the proliferation of people like me who have their feet in multiple worlds,” she says, “it’s a good investment to extend beyond the early career group into a little bit more of the mid-career group.”

Navigating a career in a nascent field like civic science can take some creativity and tenacity, Aurbach says. You may need to forge your own unique path. “You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to land in order to take a good next step,” she says. “Through my career, I have taken a lily pad approach: Take the best next step right in front of you, again and again. Over and over, figure out how you can leverage that best next step into something that is meaningful for you.”

Today, Aurbach continues working to push universities to have “slightly more permeable boundaries” that truly serve societal benefit. Civic science matters, and universities must evolve their deepest structures to recognize it, she says. Through her fellowship work, she’s provided not just the argument but the architectural blueprints for that evolution. Now it’s up to institutions—and those who fund them—to build it.

Elyse is a member of the 2021-23 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her Fellowship was supported by The Kavli Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation.