 My background is, it's a bit of an odd one perhaps, my undergraduate degree is in German literature and I had almost a second major in biology, I just chose not to do a second thesis. In German literature there's a long tradition of exploring the relationship between science and technology and society. I would say I benefited from the opportunity to think first in a structured way about the role of science and technology in society in German literature courses and through fiction. And then when I graduated from my undergraduate degree my first real-world job was working in a medical genetics research lab where we're doing gene therapy research for an inborn error metabolism that affects kids and it's a disease for which there are currently treatments. It does not make life easy for those kids who have this disease but it is certainly a condition that many people are living successfully with and the technology that I was working on developing was one that creates all sorts of really complex ethical questions. If we were successful in developing gene therapy technologies that introduces a lot of difficult societal questions, for example, should there be limits on the types of modifications we would seek in our children? How do you define disease? I started really thinking deeply about science and society and the complexity of that interface from building on the undergraduate degree but then applying it to this real-world situation. I try to introduce my students to the insight that we have environmental dilemmas not because people who don't agree with us don't understand the facts of the world but we have environmental dilemmas in part because we as a society we disagree with one another on key issues along the lines of what form of government is appropriate in our democracy, what constitutes government overreach, our markets, how we solve problems or markets what cause environmental problems. If we don't agree with each other on some of those basic levels we're never going to agree on how to understand and how to address real-world environmental or social problems. My goal is to help students understand that offering facts to someone who doesn't already agree with you rarely is going to persuade them to change their opinion or their political preferences. What we instead need is the skill set that would allow us to have meaningful, deliberative exchange of ideas that also is about values and not just about facts, facts, facts.