I’ve recently been thinking about this: There are a lot of Americans who don’t know a single scientist.
This is one of our biggest failures as a community. When we March for Science in April, we’ll be fighting for our right to freely communicate with the people whose taxes fund our work and the legislators who we hope will use our work to inform policymaking. But we haven’t done a good job of actually communicating with people about what we do.
As a first-year graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, I’m spending the year trying out different laboratories before picking the one where I’ll do my thesis work. Along with observing experiments, I get to watch how senior scientists interact with the public. The depressing truth is that many don’t.
Hi Sara!
I love this article and it brought my attention to STAT which I now also love. I am a PhD candidate in Toxicology and I am joining the March for Science for the exact reasons you described in your article. We have started a movement in Denver called Women’s Day of Service https://womensdayofservice.wixsite.com/wdos to empower women to get out into our communities together to do some good. We are a volunteer grassroots movement with a big message and no money. I am bringing this movement to the March for Science as an information booth to recruit scientists to community service opportunities. I would like to use your article along with Mike Reddy’s image above and the hashtag #actuallivingscientist to promote your message because this message needs to be spread. If scientists can integrate into the community and be seen first as people and secondarily as experts, we can increase the people who know a scientist. I will of course cite sources – Please let me know what else I need to do to avoid copyright infringement?