About Liz

Liz is the Assistant Director of Science Outreach. Though she hasn’t held a PipetteMan in 6 years, she still occasionally dreams of running PCR gels. These days she’s more likely to sustain repetitive stress injuries from livetweeting science conferences or joining marathon conference calls. Lately she’s been baking lots of artisanal bread, finding it to be effective as both a crosstraining and carb-loading exercise.

5/3/13 Link Round-Up

3 May, 2013 By Liz 1 Comment

Our week here at COMPASS began with the excitement of our commentary piece coming out in PLOS Biology, but is ending on an even higher note. Many scientists we’ve worked with are stepping up to share personal stories of engagement. There have been stories of how:

Reaching out via both traditional (Don Boesch) and social (Isabelle Côté) media can open up new opportunities for connecting science to policy
Future effective engagement of scientists outside academia relies on cultural change regarding time management (Jessica Hellman, Jim Cloern) and restructuring institutional incentives (Chris Buddle)
Becoming better at engaging sometimes means leaving the ivory tower for training in another field (Ryan Kelly) or pursuing science at a for-profit company (Dawn Wright)
Doing good science and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t is a critical part of the path to engagement (Simon Donner, Heather Leslie)
Above all, it is not science alone, but also hope that inspires people to act (Alan Townsend, Steve Palumbi)

You can watch the conversations unfolding on twitter at #reachingoutsci, or see the running list we’re keeping on our kick-off post.

This is part of a growing trend of scientists being willing to be present as characters in the story. Efforts like Looks Like Science or The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers, highlight how valuable it can be to share personal stories of who we are, why we do what we do, and why it matters. All of us at COMPASS continue to be inspired by these stories and the scientists who share them. And we can’t wait to see what’s next…

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

#GradSciComm: How COMPASS is Answering the National Demand for Science Communication Training

1 April, 2013 By Liz 1 Comment

Journalist Jon Hamilton helps to facilitate a COMPASS workshop for School of Global Environmental Sustainability Fellows at Colorado State.

This post is co-authored by Liz Neeley and Erica Goldman.

With all of the speculation about the sequester’s possible impacts on science, one sobering conclusion feels clear: young scientists will be hit hard by cuts to federal science budgets. While new faculty may have some buffer, those dependent on the grants of others – like graduate students and postdocs – are already suffering a loss of projects and career opportunities. Paired with a job market where less than 20% of new science PhD’s can expect to find a tenure-track job, and it is a grim picture indeed. While much of this is far outside the control of an individual researcher, there is still an important role for personal action. Investing the time and energy to fine-tune communication skills not only makes scientists more competitive, but can also equip them to engage in critically important discussions about our most urgent social priorities. Now, more than ever, next-generation scientists on all career trajectories need to be effective communicators and advocates for why their work matters. (You can read some of our related blogs and articles on this topic here, here, and here.) [Read more...]

Filed Under: About COMPASS, Catalyzing Science, How We Do What We Do, Science, Trainings Tagged With: graduate education, landscape sleuthing, NSF, science communication, STEM, survey, workshop

AAAS 2013 – The Beauty and Benefits of a Network

11 February, 2013 By Liz 5 Comments

The AAAS Meeting will be held in Boston this week.

Photo of the Boston Skyline courtesy of: Werner Kunz via Flickr.

As Boston digs out from this weekend’s historic nor’easter, the city is experiencing a second, rather different type of accumulation event. As they do every year (though the location varies), thousands of scientists and hundreds of journalists from around the world convene for the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting. This year the theme, “The Beauty and Benefits of Science,” encourages participants to think about not only the aesthetic pleasure of pure understanding, but also the practical value of applied knowledge. If you know us, you know it’s a very appealing theme for COMPASS!

This year, I’ll be attending along with Chad English, Karen McLeod, and Erica Goldman. We’ll be sitting in, and sometimes live-tweeting, sessions on topics ranging from marine spatial planning, food security, and the future of conservation to creative communication tactics and graduate education reform.

This meeting has been a fixture on the COMPASS calendar since 2001 because it offers a great breadth of science topics, making it an excellent complement to the deep disciplinary conferences we attend. Most importantly, it is an unparalleled opportunity to reconnect with friends and colleagues from the media, science, policy and nonprofit worlds. Year after year, our most important task at AAAS is networking. One of our most visible activities, for example, has been our signature Marine Mixer, where countless collaborations, story ideas, and projects have been hatched over the past decade. [Read more...]

Filed Under: About COMPASS, Conferences, How We Do What We Do Tagged With: AAAS, discussions, facilitating conenctions, lectures, networking, plenaries

Wading into a Conference Tweet-Stream

10 December, 2012 By Liz 8 Comments

The author tends to pair her mid-air tweeting with Ginger Ale.

The flight attendant just rather ominously announced that the third and final beverage service is underway, snapping me back to the reality of seat 27F. With an empty middle seat and strong wifi, I’d lost track of time, catching up on emails and keeping tabs on the conference I’d just left – the American Geophysical Union (AGU)’s annual fall meeting – still in full swing.

This year, AGU had more than 22,000 attendees – a new record for them, and a tremendous opportunity for networking and catching up on some of the latest and greatest earth, ocean, and climate science out there. For me, each day was an inspiring but intense sprint between sessions, meetings, social events, and more, chaos only held at bay by intense scheduling underpinned by great technology. My secret weapon? Twitter. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Advice, Communications, New Media, Social media, Twitter Tagged With: #AGU12, AGU, conferences, live-tweeting, top 3, Twitter

Taming Beastly Press Releases

11 September, 2012 By Liz 7 Comments

As a verb, pique means “to stimulate (interest or curiosity).” As a noun, however, it has a rather different sense: “a feeling of irritation or resentment.” It strikes me that there may be no more perfect word to describe a certain fixture of the science journalism world… the press release. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Advice, Communications, Messaging, Outreach Tagged With: communications, interviews, messaging, Outreach, press releases

About Us: Karen McLeod

6 September, 2012 By Liz 1 Comment

One of Karen's many cakes, complete with a very happy birthday girl.

Karen McLeod is COMPASS’ Director of Science and author of this week’s inspiring post on how science can begin to navigate and tackle society’s thorniest challenges, even when the path is steep. Check out her post, Reflections from the Backcountry, here.

A big-picture thinker, Karen has said about her job: “I lead COMPASS’ efforts to advance the state of the science by connecting the dots (among people and topics) that otherwise might not be connected.” And, with COMPASS broadening its scope beyond oceans to include a broader spectrum of topics, Karen admits dot connecting in this new realm will be “super exciting (and admittedly, slightly terrifying.).” She also loves that her job is about asking the tough questions, “What does a particular scientific finding mean in the grand scheme of things? What does it mean for policy or practice? And how does that research fit into the larger whole? What are the societal implications of what we know now and what we’re on the cusp of learning about the world? These are the questions that motivate me.”

Here’s a little bit more about Karen: [Read more...]

Filed Under: About us, Miscellaneous Tagged With: About Us, Karen McLeod