 Hey everyone, I'm welcome. How are you here? My name is Godwin Omuchokwa. I'm the head of Communities at E-Life and I decided to welcome all of you to today's webinar for September, the ECR webinar. I think it's called ECR Wednesday and today is Monday so you're at the right place. Thanks very much. Welcome. If you're unfamiliar, this series aims to give any career researchers a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. You can follow us on Twitter, E-Life Community and with the hashtag ECR Wednesday. The session is being recorded and will be made available on YouTube in the near future. So the ECR Wednesday webinar series is usually led by members of E-Life's Early Career Advisory Group. Yeah, so these are the members of ECR. Yeah, thank you. So for the first two special webinars, we have been led by members of E-Life's 2022 cohort of the Community Ambassadors and it brings me great pleasure to welcome our panelist, Narabi Ones, Emily Meyers, Shannon Koslovic, and Hannah Jeanette that alongside today's chair, Nick Bogozinski, please join me in welcoming Nick and our panelist and I'll pass it on to Nick now. Thank you. Thank you, Godwins, and hello everybody. Thank you for joining us today for our ECR Wednesday slash Monday webinar on science policy in action. My name is Nick Bogozinski and I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Medicine and an E-Life Community Ambassador and I'll be moderating this webinar. E-Life is a non-profit organization that is operating a platform to improve all aspects of research communication by encouraging and recognizing the most responsible behaviors in research. Today, our webinar panelists will discuss real-world applications of science policy and science policy related projects in detail. Following the panelists' presentations and discussion, we will invite questions and comments from the audience. But first, let me start with some housekeeping. During the webinar, please be respectful, honest, inclusive, accommodating, appreciative, and open to learning from everyone else. Do not attack, demean, disrupt, harass, or threaten others or encourage such behavior. And if you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome on any of these webinars, please contact E-Life by email via elife-safety-team at protonmail.com and we reserve the right to ask anyone to leave and or to deny access to a subsequent webinar. And so before I introduce our panel, I'd like to say just a few quick words about what I think it means to put science policy into action in our times. And I'll just say I'm really excited about this event. And I think that we have a lot to learn here. So what I'll say to sort of frame the conversation that we'll have throughout the rest of the webinar is that now more than ever, I think scientists are leaving academia and finding new ways to engage in science both at the bench and away from it. And one important implication of this for science policy, in my opinion, is that it highlights how building collective political subjectivities that span industries and expertise is going to be crucial to changing science at the policy level. And that means engaging professors and student workers and lab techs and journal editors and many other people in science policy so that we can actually build a more equitable and just scientific culture in the future. And so I'm incredibly excited about our panel today because our panelists represent an incredibly diverse range of experiences in science policy from community outreach to labor organizing to public health and biotech. And so I think there will be many lessons to be learned about effectively engaging in science policy. So with that, I'll turn the floor over to our first panelist, Naomi Wallace, the manager of impact initiatives at the Association of Science and Technology Centers. Naomi, we invite you to share your screen. Thank you for the introduction. Like Nick said, I'm Naomi and I work at the Association of Science and Technology Centers. In my previous life, I was a graduate student studying neuroscience at Washington State University where I met Nick and we worked together on a graduate student science policy group. Throughout grad school, I had an increasing interest in sort of communication and science policy. So after I finished my PhD in 2020, I started looking for a position outside of academia and I found the Association of Science and Technology Centers. So ASTC is a membership organization for science centers and science museums. And we are really working to expand the role of museums and increase their capacity to engage with their communities in new ways and really enter this space of sort of civic engagement and policy work. So some of our goals are to have museums not just support lifelong learning but also work at things that are at the intersection of science and society, encouraging museums to start engaging more diverse communities in deeper conversation and to really partner with other organizations to start helping tackle these local and global challenges that are related to science. Some of the other speakers might address some more traditional science policy things, but I'm not talking as much about the part where we are talking to the politicians or writing the policy, more about talking to communities and figuring out what their priorities are. Ultimately, no matter how much of an expert you are in your fields or an expert you are at doing policy work, you really need to know what is that your community is prioritizing and looking for to affect that positive change that you want to see in the world. So what makes museums a good place for doing this kind of work? Well, museums already have deep connection with their local communities. They often have partnerships with school districts, neighborhood organizations, and things like local climate change advocacy groups or other science-related policy groups. So they can already be sort of a doorway into those communities. Museums are also a great place to work as conveners. They often have large meeting spaces. They have things like exhibits and visualizations that can help to make data more accessible and understandable to people. And of course they have their wonderful staff, a bunch of people who are already trained in educating and talking about science. And finally, and most importantly, museums are trusted. So we all know well that general interest, trust in scientists, in the government, in traditional media has really been eroding recently. But what we see consistently is that people really trust the information that they get from museums. In a 2021 study by the American Alliance of Museums, their random sample rated museums as the second most trusted source of information, only coming second to their own friends and family. And this is true across the political spectrum, which of course is really important when you are trying to engage people in talking about different potential policy solutions, people who have different opinions about what should happen need to be in the room. So this consistent trust is a really important thing that museums can leverage to start working on science policy issues in their community. So ASTC has been working to leverage this through what we are calling our Community Science Initiative. So you've probably heard about citizen science, which usually refers to people gathering data points about something, using an app on their phone to say what birds they see in their local area. And this is obviously a great way to get people engaged with and interested in science. But it's still a very sort of top down process where the research questions are decided on by the scientist. And usually the output of that is a traditionally published research paper that might be behind the paywall. So when we're talking about community science, we're talking about really going beyond that, finding ways that community members can collaborate with scientists to answer their own questions and to find their own solutions to problems that will actually work for them in their communities. And this often involves projects that involve both scientists, like researchers and science engagement practitioners, like the people who are on museum staff. The solutions that communities can come to can mean a lot of different things. Sometimes that's about the behavior of the community or a policy of an institution, but it can also often result in advocacy, writing policy, all of these different ways that people interact with government at all different levels. Once they've had a chance to talk about it as a community and really come to a solution that a lot of people can get behind, which makes for stronger policy. So when we talk about community science, we're talking about a wide range of different approaches that can look anywhere on the spectrum from that sort of citizen science thing to all sorts of different policy work. But I'd like to zoom in on one of the approaches that we've been working on a lot recently, and that is dialogue and deliberation. So dialogue and deliberation is sort of a way of approaching these structured conversations to come to solutions together. A dialogue portion will be focused on listening and learning from one another so people in the community can get a stronger sense of what the scientific consensus is, as well as what the different opinions are of the different stakeholders throughout their community. While deliberation work is more focused on examining and weighing options, talking about pros and cons, finding ways that different solutions can be combined so that people can actually come together to common ground and make decisions about these solutions. So these events can look very different depending on what the needs are. It can last anywhere from a few hours to being multiple sessions that occur over weeks or even months. It might involve 10 people in a small town or 1,000 people talking about a national issue. But the things that really make a dialogue and deliberation event that you see across them, that you're bringing multiple stakeholders to the table. So for the types of events that we are talking about in the community science round, this can mean bringing local politicians, scientific researchers, and different community members all together. And that slice of the community might look different depending on what the issue is. Maybe it's people who live in an area that frequently floods. Maybe it's agricultural workers or people who work in public health. It can involve the people who really have the strongest stake in your topic to be having this conversation all together sort of outside of the idea of expertise or just lecturing or telling someone about the science. These are structured conversations that often start with some way of providing information that might have some of that giving a talk or giving something for them to read before the events start. Then it moves into these structured smaller group conversations where you have trained facilitators who are ready to ask good questions and guide the conversation to keep people on track towards thinking about solutions together. And it also always needs some way of gathering this information so that you can use it later. So this might mean making audio recordings of the discussion, having your facilitator take notes or having the participants take notes themselves or even do interesting things like make art projects that represent the change that they want to be in their community. And then finally, you go into the phase of sort of developing and sharing solutions. Once people have come together to decide on what they would like to do, then you then decide that into a report and find ways of communicating it to all of the people who can actually make the change that you would like to see. So I'd like to give you just a couple of brief examples of some dialogue and deliberation at Museum. The Nurture Nature Center is one that we point to often. They were started off after a series of floods in Pennsylvania in the early 2000 and they've worked on having people together to have conversation about climate resilience in their communities and talk about ways to do things like improve the national weather systems, flood warning system, which has actually changed based on some of the things that they put in their report after their dialogue and deliberation event. And also things like doing needs assessments for particular communities, which are really doing this in this much more community-centered, collaborative way. We also have two examples here from our fellowship program, which I'm very proud of, that they are still in process. So at the Natural History Museum of LA, we have a fellow who is working on talking to people in underrepresented communities about what makes them feel welcome in green space and what makes green spaces accessible to them, working on putting together a report for the city and county there to help make better parks that are accessible to all. And we have someone at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who is working on scientific misinformation, particularly around COVID-19, and figuring out ways to increase trust in media, both through influencing the media itself, community member behaviors, and local government policies. So to close it out, I know that was a quick lying overview. You can learn way more about all of this cool work at communityscience.astc.org, including guides that can help you think about how you might want to incorporate some of these approaches into your own science policy work. And also please feel free to send me an email anytime at nwallisatastc.org. We are working to find some new ways of incorporating more research scientists into the work that we do at the museum that would be very interested to hear any of your ideas. Thank you. Thank you, Naomi. That was fascinating. And I can't wait to see how some of that develops over the next few decades. Our next panelist is Emily Myers, an organizer and policy and political advisor with UAW 4121, the union representing over 8,000 academic student employees, postdoctoral scholars and research scientists at the University of Washington. Emily, the floor is yours. Thanks, Nick. Yeah, hi, everyone. My name is Emily Myers. I usually hear pronouns. Everyone can see my screen all right. Is that, can I get a thumbs up from someone? Great. Okay. Perfect. Yeah, so I, in my previous life before starting this role, I was a PhD student at the University of Washington in pharmacology doing proteomics research research. And now I work in this role as a organizer as well as I do a lot of our policy and political work within our union. And so the UAW, as Nick mentioned, we represent, you know, undergrad and graduate teaching and research assistants, postdoc scholars and research scientists at the University of Washington. And I should also mention that the United Auto Workers, which is the UAW, we represent about 100,000 academic workers across the United States, including folks at Harvard, the University of California system, Columbia and more. So I'm going to start the stage just by quickly touching on science policy. Science policy is such a large topic and can have so many different pieces to it. So I wanted to touch on this a little bit that there, you know, when I think of science policy, I think of different types of science policy, both working on science for policy as I mean, like, you know, incorporating our science into the policy decision making that's happening at all levels of government, but then also policy for science and scientists. So, you know, we think of science for policy as using our research or data and our evidence to push evidence based science driven policy, as well as study the impacts of policy, policy decisions that are being made, you know, at every level of government. And then on the other hand, there's also, I also work on policy for science and scientists, meaning that, and these things could be things like advocating for increased research funding, higher education funding, pushing for better policies to make science a public good. And how, you know, how does science, how do policies impact us as scientists, both at the bench in the field and in our, in our, you know, writing and grant making fields. So I really want to touch quickly on the first aspect that we're going to spend most of my time talking about policy for scientists, but we also do a lot of science policy work in helping bring science into policy making. So for those, you know, if anyone here is part of the union or involved in other labor organizations, I really just want to highlight this quickly to know that you can plug into science policy work with your union. So we typically have both political and policy teams as part of our international unions. And we often employ lobbyists as well at the federal level. And then, you know, if you drill down into like local unions, a lot of times we have work groups where members come together to work on specific issues. And those can be things like climate justice, you know, reproductive justice, all sorts of things, where we're able to both go into the community and go into, you know, our state houses and things like that, and advocate as both scientists and union members. And it's, and it's really impactful to be able to come just to, you know, when I go down to our state capital and talk to our policymakers, you know, I can go down there and say, you know, I represent 8,000 people at the University of Washington. I'm not just here me by myself. And so, you know, that has a tremendous impact. And so here on the screen, you'll see one of my members is advocating for some climate justice recommendations that were put together at the state level. And so she's testifying in the Senate Ways and Means Committee. You'll also see here that, you know, unions also often have an existing infrastructure for doing political and policy work. And so I see my colleagues here, you know, had an open membership meeting with Congresswoman Katie Porter, which is just to say that we can really use our unions to plug into science policy advocacy. But then also, there's always a lot of opportunities to do science communication with both labor in the labor community and as well as the local community. So a few years ago, we helped a lot on this initiative 1631, which is about carbon pricing. And we had a lot of educational and other types of events to educate our communities as well as our labor community here locally around carbon pricing, what that meant for jobs, just transitions, things like that. So it's kind of switching gears and thinking more about policies that impact scientists. You know, I regularly advocate for things like increased science funding, you know, access to training grants and things like that. We had a letter writing campaign early in the pandemic calling on our government to increase research funding and protect scientists very early on in the pandemic, especially early career researchers who are particularly vulnerable to some of these aspects, especially under our previous presidential administration. But what I really want to, and, you know, you can see here, you know, the March for Science, our UAW folks out at Columbia were there for that. And then, you know, policy decisions are impacting us as far as like open science and how science is translated into the public. And that, you know, the White House recently came out with a directive that said all, you know, publicly funded research should be publicly available. So things like that are also things that we touch on. But what I really want to focus on today is policies that impact scientists. And I really got my start in policy around the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Mass, and put out this report in 2018 talking about sexual harassment and gender harassment in the academy and particularly in science. You know, we do have a culture of harassment and bullying inside of science. And personally, after facing, you know, gender and sexual harassment and discrimination at every institution I worked at, I already did research and it was particularly bad in grad school. So when this report came out and it said, you know, 50% of women have been harassed on the job, I was actually surprised that it wasn't closer to 100%. So as I dove into this issue, and I saw more and more of the issues facing us as early career researchers, you know, our working conditions tend to be unsustainable and our institutions are either too slow or, you know, avoiding dealing with the issues directly. So if you look at, you know, the news or if you read comment sections of our various journals, you'll often see headlines that look like this, where, you know, mental health is tanking within the research community. And we have several overlapping crises always inside of science. You know, there's a crisis for parents and caregivers who, you know, can't afford childcare. You know, there's huge variations in our stipends and what our salaries are. And, you know, there's these op-ends that, you know, tell scientists you should go, you know, go get a side job because, you know, working in your lab is not enough. Go get a side job rather than, you know, just paying folks fairly. Or things, you know, like I mentioned, harassment is, you know, pretty common in academia, unfortunately. And then even touching on things like, how does the immigration policy affect us as scientists? And, you know, when the Trump administration put forth a ban that would ban scientists from particular regions or other students from coming in or, you know, our international students here at the University of Washington, we're facing deportation. You know, these are the types of conditions that we work under. And these are extremely rough and stressful. And it's no wonder that we have a mental health care crisis within the scientific community, especially among early researchers. So after all, we are whole people who are doing science. And, you know, I always say, like, science and research should be intellectually difficult, but it should not be difficult to feed and house yourself while you're doing that research. So we are whole people and our living and working conditions do impact us as scientists. So, you know, currently, a lot of the top data approaches just aren't working, and in some cases can actually cause further harm. But through collective bargaining, which is the process that we use as a union to bargain as equals with our universities and our employers, we are, we are able to then bargain as thousands of people together and have a direct collective say in what aspects of our work that we want to change. And so we do this, our postdocs at the University of Washington go into bargaining in just a few weeks here for their next contract. Our research scientists are in bargaining for their first contract. But what this allows us to do is really take a bottom-up grassroots approach in how we want to change our working conditions. So, for example, to just kind of piggyback on some of the issues raised in the last slide that we see over and over again, you know, because of our contracts, we've been able to win improvements on our mental health care coverage, especially for the graduate students who have almost, who have very low costs now for mental health care coverage. We, through our collective bargaining agreements, have childcare funds to help support postdoc and graduate student parents. That childcare is extremely expensive. And it would be, it's just a lot of money to be able to pay out when you are on such a low stipend. We also have a language on mentorship and career development, making sure people have access to secondary mentors, you know, to really help disrupt the power structure of our apprenticeship type models that we have in science where one person has a lot of power over your career and your path forward. You know, we have paid time off. We have appointment security and just cost protections. You know, you can't get fired for getting pregnant here. Things like that, you know, things have to, you have just, you have to go through a just cause procedure if someone is being terminated. We have strong protections against harassment, including we have a state of the art program, which the university pays three graduate students and three postdocs to lead skills-based intervention training to help improve the culture of research here at the University of Washington. We have transparent wages and wages and yearly raises, health insurance, protection for international scholars, healthy and safe conditions. This was a really big part of our contract in the last few years, making sure that people had proper safety precautions and COVID procedures. And then lastly, you know, the last thing I'll highlight is our grievance procedure. The grievance procedure is where we are able to make complaints that the university has violated the contract if we need to. And the university isn't the final decision maker in those. We have the ability to go to neutral third-party arbitration, which gives us real recourse, especially in cases of harassment and discrimination to be able to actually, you know, have our employer not be the final decision maker of something. So if something bad happened or what types of remedies we need in order for that person to be able to continue their work. And then really quickly too, we'll just say that off campus, you know, as a collective, because we all have so many different areas of expertise within our union, you know, we are the entire campus that we're able to do a lot of advocacy and science policy work outside of that. So, you know, on outside of campus, we're fighting for things like affordable housing and renters rates. And so many of us are renters. We won paid family medical leave here at the state of Washington, which, you know, also also like the same folks that are here doing their their public policy degrees are also, you know, fighting at the state for paid family medical leave. As I mentioned, we do a lot of work on climate justice and reproduction reproductive justice, as well as improved immigration policies and more. So, you know, our unions really are these places that we can plug in and leverage our collective ability to win on big things. Whereas any of us individually might have a really hard time, but when you know, we are thousands of people doing this work together, we're able to really make the improvements that really impact people's lives, especially as science workers. Thank you, Emily. That was great. And as a non unionized postdoc, I'm incredibly grateful for the work that you do. So, we can now welcome our next panelist, Shannon Kozlovich, a science and policy contractor working on projects for local, national and international organizations. Shannon, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Nick. So, I am Shannon Kozlovich, and I just wanted to kind of bring the conversation back to the impact that policy has on human health and well-being. And so, this is the intersection that I work in. It's kind of where science meets policy meets community. And I got there from a very interesting path. I was what's called in the United States an untraditional student, which basically as far as I can tell means that I was old, when I started by PhD or walked into my first college class. I was the single parent of a third grader the first time I stepped into a college classroom here in the United States. And from there, I decided that I liked college so much. I was going to stay for nine and a half years and get a PhD. My PhD is in pharmaceutical sciences. So, basically I'm a biochemist. From there, I went and I did a traditional postdoc. I made it about eight months in a traditional postdoc academic environment and was like, I am out. This is not where I'm spending my career. I probably shouldn't be here for any more time at the wage that the United States is allowed to pay postdocs. So, I went and I worked for a couple of years at a nonprofit organization that worked on civil rights and social justice for the lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, and queer community. And so, I worked in a space where I was a scientist that was working directly on policy, particularly health equity policy. So, looking at where the policies are that impact human health and well-being. Right now, I am self-employed. So, I take independent contract work from organizations like Health Care Department or Departments of Public Health within the United States. I've also had contracts with the World Health Organization and numerous other entities that are looking for the skills and expertise that I have. I just kind of wanted to find some terms because I know we are all scientists here. So, a lot of health equity focuses on social determinants of health, which is the quality of life that someone lives that determines the health that they have through their entire life. Whereas, I spend a lot of my time working on political determinants of health. And this is where health and well-being are impacted by groups that hold power. It is the institutions that operate our lives, whether it's the government or your school, your higher institution, anything, the stores that you shop at. All of these institutions hold policies and processes, and they have interests, their ideological position that are held within both political systems and cultures at multiple levels of government. From something as simple as policies in your local store where you go shopping to the policies that are held in your national government. And impacting those policies, in my opinion, is where I see myself fitting the best in helping advance health and well-being for all of humanity. I very much have a world savior complex, and I have always wanted to save the world. So, this is why I do the work that I do. When you're looking at creating policy change, you can create policy change within a government. You have been creating policy change from the inside by getting elected or appointed into positions, however that works within the nation that you live in, or your local area, or you can lobby for change from the outside. In a lot of societies where we vote for our elected officials, the voters in those areas tend to have play in what the government does and the policies that they hold. And then there are a lot of nonprofit and for-profit companies that have government relations positions that you can look for and explore and get into that just like both Naomi and Emily were talking about, can impact policy, whether it's policy for science or science or policy. And then there are institutions. These places have so much power in our lives, or they don't nearly have enough power, which is what we saw as the pandemic and the World Health Organization. But these institutions also hold policies that can be changed by the communities that they serve. And it's very similar work to changing policies within government. It's just different in a lot of ways because you're not writing policies and then convincing politicians that they need to change them. It's a little bit more needing to bring the community in some marketing, occasionally shaming campaigns, and things like that to change the way that our institutions are functioning. So basically the way that I see all of the work that I do and how these things come into play together are at the various ways that science, policy, and community intersect with each other. And for anyone who's not familiar, the intersection of science and community is at community-based participatory research. And what this is, and this is a research model that actually says the community should be driving the questions and involved in every stage of research development. So it's creating community advisory boards, bringing in target populations that are most impacted by the research that you are proposing to do, and teach them a little bit about what is unknown or what is already known, and then ask the community. What do you see are the best avenues to go? What are the best approaches? How do we best get participants from your community to come into our research project? Because a lot of clinical research can't happen unless we have participants for our research. And then there's a lot of science policy work, but it's the intersection of science and policy, which you've heard a lot about already in past webinars today. And then there's where community of policy come together. And this is where you get the activists, the ones that are out there on the street corner with signs, the protesters, the things that are happening, where the community is out there being loud and in your face and very much activating community members for policy change. And then we have where all three of these come together. And this is mainly the intersection of where I work, and I'll give a couple of examples of what this work looks like. And this is community-centered research that works for institutional change. I am a research scientist. My biochemistry was all about tobacco and how tobacco causes cancer, so I work in a lot of both tobacco and cancer spaces. One of the spaces I work in is tobacco as a health equity issue for the LGBTQ plus community in general. And what I do is I help institutions build research programs where the communities that are facing the highest levels of inequity are involved in creating the research project. This means that the community is engaged from the very beginning to build community trust and science and the scientific process because they have eye in from the first stages of the project development. And in this arena, we do a lot of work to combine community capacity-building grants that are available. And this is different depending on where it is that you live and your research is centered. In the United States, we've got a lot of subnational and national programs that provide community grants, but there are also a lot of international organizations and programs and other nations that have similar types of grant mechanisms. And when these are combined with the usual suspects in funding research, I can think of words. That provides the resources and the blueprints to be able to build a research program where the community is involved and engaged in this type of research. And then one of the biggest impacts and how this data gets used is for anyone who lives in a nation that has a cancer registry, I'm working with the cancer registry here in the United States. And what cancer registries are is when there has been a confirmed case of cancer, a national program is set up to verify that that is a cancer case, collect patient demographics, and then store that information in a national system that can be pulled from to look at do we have an area of our nation or the world where a certain type of cancer is highest, and then using that data to create solutions to decrease that cancer burden. When there are particular items or parts of data that aren't being collected about people in certain areas, that means that those populations are not included in the solutions that come from that data. So one of the things that I say in every webinar that I talk about the stuff that I do is data equity is health equity. All of the research that you do, you should think about what other identities people in the community that you are targeting to work in, and ensure that you're not making someone invisible in the work that you do. And that is a huge political determinant of health, and it's held by our research programs themselves. And that is the specific determinant that I work on most to try and change, is to make sure that the data exists so that the solutions are there. Thank you. Thank you, Shannon. And so then finally, last but not least, we have Hannah Genevdar, the co-founder and CEO of Juno Bio and Illumina Back to Startup. Hannah, it's all yours. Amazing. Thank you. I'm just going to share my screen. All right. So hi, everyone. As Nick said, I'm Hannah, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Juno Bio. So we're a startup. And we exist to forge the standard of care that we deserve, and we're a women-powered platform decoding gynecological health, and we're starting with the vaginal microbiome. As a point of clarification throughout my talk, you'll hear me use the term women. And of course, that's really just a shorthand for women and people with vaginas. Our route to engaging with science policy at Juno is definitely unconventional. As I say, we're a startup, but we're very much doers. We like big, fast, responsible impact. And for the world that we currently live in, we, and for us at Juno, we definitely see the startup vehicle as being the most effective way of addressing the very dire need of the women that we look to serve. So we're very conscious that everyone has a part to play in shaping science policy. And we're definitely honored to play our role and to be stewards of women's voices. But ultimately, of course, it's people and not-for-profit companies that should drive science policy. So having said that, let's jump in and I'll share a little bit about how we started, what we do, and how we've played a role in shaping science policy. So we started in 2018. I have a background in biology and biochemical engineering, and I worked as a microbiome scientist in the lab, optimizing bacterial consortias. And around this time, we had an enormous explosion of research and commercialization of almost every single aspect of microbiomes under the sun, from the gut to the skin to the soil. But nobody was meaningfully working on the vaginal microbiome. And that really shocked me, because the vaginal microbiome is a key component of women's health. It's implicated in over 30 women's health conditions from recurrent bacterial vaginosis all the way through to things like infertility and miscarriages. So billions of women are affected by vaginal microbiomes when they're disrupted. And it's not an insignificant sort of impact that it has. So even the sort of conditions that are considered primary or simple, things like recurrent bacterial vaginosis, deeply impact the people that are affected by it. So two-thirds of women that have recurrent bacterial vaginosis or that type of recurrent infection, for instance, have depression and anxiety and a quality of life score lower than people with diabetes or COPD. And the current solutions, they just don't work. The gold standard, for instance, for diagnosing people with bacterial vaginosis is the only ever right 61% of the time, which is obviously abysmal. And given that of all the microbiomes, this is actually the most readily accessible in terms of sampling. It's the most actionable, and it's hugely impactful in women's lives. For me, it just didn't make sense that we weren't paying any attention to it, that it wasn't getting the dollars behind it that it should have, and that really, you know, the talent that should be working on it wasn't. But ultimately, that was a symptom of where we are with women's health and indeed healthcare more broadly. The healthcare system fails women at every single level. So we know that one in five women and some studies show that it's actually more than this have their symptoms completely ignored when they go to the physician's office. It takes women four times longer to reach a diagnosis across 700 conditions than it does men and women are twice as likely to have adverse stroke reactions, because they were never really included in the research and clinical trials to begin with. So women are unacceptably dismissed, they're severely underserved, and the research that is needed, the science research that's needed, is significantly under-researched. To address this is the challenge we would need to and still need to. Number one, educate women and make sure that they have the access and ability to advocate for themselves in order to get the healthcare that they need. We would need to retrain healthcare workers so that we root out the conscious and unconscious biases that are involved here. We would need to equip healthcare workers with better diagnostics and therapeutics. We would need to address the disparity in research and clinical trials and of course we would need to reconfigure the national guidelines and spend here. And that's a tall order and it's a it's a thing that would take a while because it's re-addressing, reframing the whole entire way that we deal with women's health. And so at Juno, for us, you know, while this is incredibly important, we also wanted to make sure that we were addressing the need of the women today. And so that's how and why we started Juno as a startup. So as I said, we're building the standard of care we deserve. We're a platform for gynecological health and we're starting with vaginal microbiome tests. So we decided that there's a lot of investor money out there and it's going into getting you your groceries faster or a whole host of other things that really in our opinion shouldn't be getting the dollars that it does. And so we subverted that money into actually addressing the issues that women face. And it was a little, you know, easy to do that because the macro trends are in our favor. So we have key enabling technologies that are enabling us to build and bring solutions to women today. There's a massive shift to at-home testing. There's a market with increasing purchasing power and there are business models that have been proven in this space where consumer tests power up further research and development that at the end of the day change the course of healthcare available to everyone. So we were quickly backed and we started and set about running the Juno study. And so in 2019, we launched one of the biggest initiatives of its kind when it comes to the vaginal microbiome. An IRB approved study over a thousand women from all over the US took part and we built one of the richest repositories of vaginal microbiomes. So this was everything around what is the best way of analyzing this? Where are we making the biggest impact? And how do we access the people that we need to access? All of that information went into the launch of our first product, which was the Juno vaginal microbiome test kit. It's a simple at-home sort of collection. Samples are sent back to our lab and we use sequencing to give women a comprehensive view of what's in their vaginal microbiome. We personalize everyone's results and women use this to go and advocate for themselves, often women that have a history of recurrent infection and the current tools available are just not there for them. And over time, we've really worked to iterate on the product, listen to our community and provide them with the solution in the form that really is the best for them. And it's having an impact and that's what makes us really excited about Juno and what we do. Women are finally getting the answers that they've been looking for. Yeah. And over the last sort of two years, we've been able to really hit product market fit in the US and that means that we're able to serve the women that we're trying to serve with the kind of solution that really meets the mark. And the interesting thing about our work over the past two, three years is that it platformed the women's health issue and it platformed women and the things that they wanted to stay. And in doing that, it attracted and caused the sort of like avalanche of more people working in the space and the growth of the Femtec industry. And what that did in turn was it sort of perked up the ears of government and the policymakers. So when industry moves or it grows, government responds typically. And so in the UK, number 10 Downing Street and the Department of Health and Social Care set about working on a women's health strategy. And for the first time, they put together a six point plan to address the needs of women. And Juno played a part in making sure that they had the evidence that they needed and also in giving feedback to the shaping of that policy so that it addressed the needs of women that we were seeing from access at the physician's office all the way through to things like the holes in where the research is scientifically. So that's what we do at Juno. That's how we started. And that's the little role that we've played in science policy. I hope that gives you an idea of how Juno had a vision for the world, how we started to build towards that vision outside of a traditional route and how now we're reengaged in putting in place the long term changes while impacting women daily in the short term aspect of things. So I think that's me. Thank you, Hannah. That was fantastic. And thank you to all of our panelists today. I can say personally that I love the work that you're doing, Hannah, as you're aware because of my deep fascination with the vaginal microbiome as a researcher of sexually transmitted diseases. So I guess that will bring us to the Q&A. So if there are any questions, we have just a few minutes. Maybe if you want to go to the next slide while people are writing any questions they might have, I'll just point out that if anyone is interested in continuing this discussion, you can contact elifecommunity at community at elifesciences.org. You can also continue this discussion online using the hashtag ECR Wednesday, even though it's Monday. And you can tag at elifecommunity in your tweet. And I'm not seeing any questions popping up in the chat right now. And I would say because we only have one minute, we might just forego the Q&A, but I will wrap this up by saying thank you again to all of our panelists. That was fantastic. And I'm sure that everyone will have a lot to think about moving forward. I do see if we can maybe answer one question here. And we have one question that says my impression is that there are, and this is from Nadine, I should say, my impression is that there are a very large number of spaces where scientists could contribute to policy work. Would the panelists then advise us to follow our interests and try to make policy spaces for ourselves there, rather than chasing a role? Does anyone want to comment on that really quick before we close out? Yeah, I do think that one thing that scientists need to be aware of is when you go out into non-academic fields, they're not ready for you. They have no idea what to do with you. So you actually have to walk into non-academic spaces and say here is where I see I fit. And I had to do that with the nonprofit organization that I went to. I said, hey, this is what I can bring to your organization. And I do think that we have more than ability to do that as scientists and PhD holders than a lot of people do, especially when we step outside of academia. So just kind of think of a role that you want and go pitch that role to a place where you want to work. Great. Thank you, Shannon. I think that'll probably do it for us today. And thank you again to everybody. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. And we hope to see you next time. Wonderful. Thank you so much to everyone who's joined. And thank you, Nick, for staring that. I'll be in touch with everyone here. And if there are any questions that come through, I will email them onto you all. Thank you all again. I'll speak to you all really soon. I think for anyone who's still here, Shannon has put her email below. And I can email that on as well. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you so much for your time. Brilliant. And you. Thanks, folks. Bye. Bye.