 Good afternoon and welcome to likeable science. I'm your host Ethan Allen here at the ThinkTech studios and excited to have you with us here for another episode of likeable science where we talk about why people should care about science, why people should like science, why people should engage with science all the time. Science is indeed a bigger and bigger part of all of our lives every day and it's no longer something that can be relegated to ivory towers put aside and sort of it shouldn't be an object of fear. It should be embraced by all. Today we have a guest joining us from Skype Dr. Stephanie Vasco and we're gonna be talking about flexibility and resilience and how science training and careers can both encourage and promote that. Welcome Stephanie. Hi Ethan. Good to have you with me here. Thank you. So I first met Stephanie when we were both back in Seattle at the University of Washington. She was going through a graduate program, a so-called dual degree program in nanotechnology and I was helping students on through that program. We met and talked some then and later on I ran into her recently through the we have shared interest in science communication and Stephanie is now managing a project called the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative that is promoting large sort of cross-disciplinary collaborations along scientists. Stephanie maybe you might say a few words about sort of how we met and a little bit about what your original science background was. Right so I did a dual PhD program at the University of Washington Seattle where I met Ethan and my home department was chemistry in the dual degree program but I worked in the material science department with Dr. Marco Rolondi and I focused on semiconductor nanofabrication specifically of silicon and germanium nanostructures using atomic force microscopy. During the course of doing that and being in the dual degree program I took a course on nanoethics that was co-taught and after that kind of really developed an interest in thinking about the societal implications of science and technology. By the time I was in my fifth year finishing up at the University of Washington I was doing the training course on societal and ethical issues in nanotechnology for users at our user center for nanotech fabrication tools at the University of Washington and then that's kind of where I really started to understand that I was interested in thinking about the ways that science and technology and society interact and the different types of careers that one could pursue thinking about those intersections. Right there was quite a quite a good group there at University of Washington pursuing the whole social and ethical issues of nanotechnology. I know Dr. Suzanne Bernard was a key leader in that group and I had the pleasure of working with her some and it's particularly when you do cutting-edge science like that right it's a very important issue the nobody really understood and still really our understanding is pretty minimal about some of the potential health impacts of nano sized particles when they're released in the environment they clearly the properties do change on the nanoscale and there are a lot of unknowns right. Right and it's also kind of a question of how do we then educate graduate students and not only graduate students who know the science but the public and legislators and policymakers on those risks as well. So this is a pretty big emerging field of ethical study and I'd say that things like big data also fall right now in the kind of way that the nanoethics field is forming up trying to figure out how to best do that education for the public. Right and there's gets into this whole business these days that you hear a lot about the uncertainty and because you're dealing with a cutting-edge a new technology that's creating literally new materials that have not been seen on the planet before there's a lot that isn't isn't known and really can't be known until you sort of produce more of this discussion sort of begin to test it right begin to have you know mice inhale silver nanoparticles or have you to sort of see what what impacts are you know might expect. Yeah so we see silver nanoparticles for example showing up in a lot of consumer products now all of your antimicrobial socks for example contain things like silver nanoparticles. Legons for yoga contain silver nanoparticles and that's one of the really interesting places for thinking about let's say the life cycle of these products that are out there so thinking about how after you're done with these socks or when they go in the washing machine what happens to that nanosilver what happens to it over the lifetime and then how does that impact your environment because we know the bulk properties of the materials we've studied these for a long time but the the properties at the nanoscale can be quite different and so this is a really interesting area of ethical analysis and life cycle analysis for scientists right now. Right and as with so many of these issues too there very much are two sides to it it's very funny I'm now currently working with drinking water issues in the remote Pacific Islands and one of the emerging technologies is essentially to use silver nanoparticles as purification agents in their water to help kill off all the microbes and incredibly valuable technique that really allows very simple robust decontamination of water in these places that desperately need that kind of technology and at the same time right we know in certain areas in the US the silver nanoparticles have gotten to such levels they've started hurting the waste disposal and water waste water treatment plants because they're killing off the microbes within those plants right. Yeah and it's also interesting to think about the fact that these nanoparticles aren't new parts of our lives right so everyone is so familiar with the white colored sunscreen which is titanium dioxide nanoparticles so that's kind of prevalent in our everyday lives but potentially not in a way that is accessible for everyone to think about or to think about the ethical implications of or to understand whether what the risks are and then how to mitigate them. Right I mean nanotech just as a subject is our field is very hard because by its nature it's invisible and a lot of it is very counterintuitive a lot of it's very abstract and so you know there it's got sort of heavy strikes against it but so so it was what you're really sort of saying though is your interest kept sort of expanding into this this STS the science technology in society and how science and technology are impacting society and how society is shaping science and technology and that you know draw you sort of away from the bench as it were. Yeah I would say that's probably the primary thing that drew me away from the bench was a desire to work with the public to work with other scientists to think about how to communicate science and to think about how when we start a research project what it looks like to manage that project through the beginning to the end of its life cycle and so when I was finishing up at University of Washington I was finishing my PhD I went to a meeting where all of the national nanotech infrastructure network user facilities sent the representative to we're teaching the ethical implications training courses to and we all got together and I met someone there who introduced me to an opportunity at Penn State to do some work on building interactive online modules to teach about ethical issues in STEM topics for graduate students so I spent three years at Penn State developing some interactive online modules that are now available on the Rock Ethics Institute's webpage that teach about what is ethics what are ethics in STEM fields and then two case studies that unpack that through biofuels and solar and while I worked at Penn State I met the director of the toolbox dialogue initiative Dr. Michael work who's a philosopher here at Michigan State and I had worked on him with him on some projects kind of tangentially but when I was finishing up at Penn State there was an opportunity to come join the toolbox dialogue initiative and the toolbox really is kind of the the culmination of all the experiences I've had we've got some educational portions we have some workshop portions I do a lot of the program and project management for the toolbox but what we do is work with teams usually of scientists but sometimes of the community or a community and scientists and we help them enhance their communication across the teams and their collaborative capacity as well so with some teams we help them get ready to write grants with some teams we help them learn to communicate better to unpack the values or assumptions that are on the team with some teams we help them do strategic planning and we help them think about their mission vision and goals right and these are these are critical aspects of doing science all those that you mentioned there and scientists in at least a lot of traditional programs haven't gotten a lot of preparation to really do them well I mean it's it's sort of parallel to the fact that you go through a PhD program in research and you're expected to be a good teacher right away without any real practice at it so scientists by its very nature so much science drives students of science into these very narrow pathways that their communication skills become very let us say oddly developed where they can communicate very effectively with others in their own field but oftentimes don't communicate very well with people outside that field so you I think that's a desire that's changing on the student side but perhaps is not reach the structural side yet so I would say there are a lot of graduate students who are really passionate about communicating their science to the public communicating their science to policymakers and there are you can see it reflected in NIH and NSF funding a lot of desire from the funding agencies to support that as well but there's this place where those come together and that's the institution that really needs to think about what it offers to students in order to help them bridge those gaps to think about taking their communication skills and their passion for the science and not necessarily for bench careers but also for bench careers be able to do that communication to the public or the policymakers right I was surprised when I was there at UW helping out in that program that when I suggested that we should do seminars where the graduate students would give five minute presentations on their work without using jargon people found that to be a sort of almost a frightening concept a number of the students said they'd never been asked to do anything like that and it didn't seem out of place to me it seemed like a sort of had a lot of clear value to people to be able to explain things in clear simple terms but for many of them apparently this was sort of the first time they had been asked to actually pull presentation about their formal science work together and give it sort of in a mode as if they weren't talking to scientists yeah I remember that correctly from when I was in the agri-program you only gave us three slides no jargon but I mean it gets back to sort of what what you know Albert Einstein his famous quote about you you don't really understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother right very very much that you need to be able to talk effectively to a public if we wish the public to support science and that support according to some study seems to be somewhat eroding these days we very much need this effective communication with scientists between scientists and the public right yeah and there's a lot of really interesting ways if you're a graduate student to pursue doing that and get that training even if your program doesn't offer it so there's training programs that are offered by institutes like compass there are some really interesting science communication like colloquia or symposium conferences that are only open to graduate students that kind of boot camp you through how to do that so keeping an eye on those it's a great idea but you'll notice now to a lot of journals professional societies have blogs attached to them and they're always looking for posters so students who are interested in doing that science communication can pursue that as an avenue as a way to start brushing up those skills maybe work with an editor learn how to communicate that and then develop a portfolio of those pieces for their postgraduate careers super we're gonna go into this in more depth here in the second half of the show and dig into sort of the toolbox initiative itself and also the need for flexibility and resilience but before we do that we have to take a brief break here we'll be back in about one minute I'm Ethan Allen host of likeable science Stephanie Vasco is joining me today from Michigan State you're watching think tech Hawaii citizen journalism from Hawaii finding the intersection of our sense of place and our place in the world right here at home great content for Hawaii from think tech hello huh how you doing it's me Angus mctec wishing you know welcome and join us to see us on Hibachi talk on think tech Hawaii join my co-hosts got all the techs out and enter the security guy every Friday from 1300 to 1345 we look forward to see you we'll talk tech and we'll have some weave it a fun and remember let your wing gang free where are you be aloha my name is Carl Campania and I'm the host of think tech Hawaii's education movers shakers and reformers I invite you to come watch our show on think tech Hawaii comm you can also see our shows on YouTube as well as you can Google search those I appreciate the time I hope that you do join us as we learn about education about the educational system here in Hawaii what the challenges are what the benefits are and how much our kids are learning so thank you hope you join us and you're back here with a likable science on a Friday afternoon I'm your host Ethan Allen with me today from Michigan State is Stephanie Vasco she is joining me we're talking about science communication and flexibility resilience a number of topics around this this issue and you know Stephanie we were speaking earlier how the training often sort of forces graduate students into these sort of narrow pathways so how is it you found what what parts of your graduate training have proven useful how have you been able to adapt that to a more away from bench career as it were yeah I've been lucky with all of the advisors that I've had that they've allowed me to have the flexibility to pursue opportunities and one of the things that I think is really important as a graduate student or really in any career stem wise is to remain open to possibilities and so I've tried on a few different hats during my time as a STEM ethics postdoc at the Rock Ethics Institute I went back to a bench position to see if that was something I really wanted to be away from and found that I was more comfortable in and enjoyed more the program and project management developing educational materials running workshops position so having that ability to be flexible having advisors that understand your goals making sure that you set that from the beginning and thinking about different opportunities to take your skills and form a narrative of who you are so one of the things that I found when reflecting on my career is something that I've enjoyed the most is this ability to do project management so when you're in the lab as a graduate student you might not think of your research or your experiment as a project but you can really reframe it to think about it that way you're doing goals and scoping you have a budget on it there's a timeline there are steps you're working with different people and you're trying to achieve an outcome and so you can really think about the skills that you've developed in the lab maybe you've done presentations for the public you've done presentations for technical audiences you've done project management you've run different types of training there are all these different skills that in the graduate student laboratory might not look like applicable skills outside but if you step back and you think about the different ways that those skills have evolved for you or the different types of responsibilities you've had you might see that they apply to different types of careers one of the places that I've been able to kind of step back and think about how my career is involved is due to an opportunity I've had this year partially through my work with the toolbox and that's to be an American Association for the advancement of science community engagement fellow and so this is funded right now by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the most of the fellows there are two fellows who are triple as fellows as well and we're working on building our community management community engagement skills as a cohort over this this current year all of us being in different organizations some professional organizations some like me an academic organizations and so I've had the opportunity for some of the visitors that we've had through that and through working with some of my cohort to think about how the skills I developed in my PhD have been really transformative over the different types of careers I've had and so another thing I kind of just want to flag there is the importance of having mentors throughout your career and of finding mentorship that really works for you I can't say enough about the mentors that I've had throughout my career from my current boss might work you mentioned Susan Brainerd earlier Marjorie Olmsted at the University of Washington all of these people have had such profound impacts on my career and on the ways that I've been able to be flexible and shift and think about how to find my skills right it's you put that extremely well about how to sort of reframe your lab skills your skills you picked up as a graduate student and then articulate those as more broadly applicable career skills and thinking of your experiments as projects and running your experiments as project management and yes and talking to your lab group as giving technical presentations and talking to K-12 audiences or whatever or broader public as again as holding public public presentation skills and those are all incredibly valuable across a broad range of careers and you demonstrate this very nicely now in terms of doing doing these these broader things you work I gather sometimes with groups in the humanities or even groups outside of academia entirely yeah so some of the groups we work with there are no academic members some of the groups we work with are a blend of the community and researchers and some of their groups we work with are strictly researchers getting ready to tackle a problem potentially they're department or program that needs to think about where they're at or they're in the midst of tackling a problem where they've been together for a while and kind of want to start to unpack their views and assumptions at the midway or maybe two-thirds the way point through a project right and it's very it may not be so obvious to people who don't study science that scientists from from different disciplines approach sort of the world in very different ways if you're doing certain you know very much hypothesis driven science you may approach a problem or situation very different from if you're a scientist mainly used to doing observational type science you know you can and those differences in perspective can really profoundly impact how you come together how you sort of see the same you know object the same project that you may be put together on now from the cross-disciplinary science and that can lead then to unfortunate misunderstandings can even lead to rather bad conflict I suspect you've seen some of that in your groups yeah we've seen some of that we've also seen the opposite we've seen some really great interaction infusion between groups but you hit upon one of our favorite prompts to you which is about that all science should be hypothesis driven because it does start to unpack that idea that not all scientists approach it from that and then even unpacking that idea of who's a scientist as a social scientist count in there what is what's the makeup of a scientific researcher so one of the ways that we go about doing this with toolbox is that we gather information from the leadership of a team that brings us in so we'll talk to them we'll run an intake questionnaire we'll develop a survey for everyone who's going to participate in one of our workshops and then we'll take that and we'll build really specific dialogue prompts that help them get at potentially unpacking their views their values their assumptions and then we run a workshop where the participants get an introduction to who we are what we've done we've run about 215 workshops worldwide and we talk a bit about what they're gonna do that day so what we do is we build an instrument the instrument consists of modules and the modules are grouped by themes and so each module has a theme and six prompts that relate to the theme there's usually somewhere between one and six modules during the workshop participants will read the modules they have a strongly agree to strongly disagree scale participants will fill that out and then we have them engage in an unstructured dialogue so we say this is your dialogue you can go wherever you want feel free to move where the prompts take you feel free to respond to the prompts we write the prompts in such a way that it gets at the issues that they're interested in that we've seen in the intake questionnaire or the survey or that we think might be important for helping them move forward past roadblocks or for building synergy within the group so they'll do that instrument they'll have the dialogue we happen to do the instrument again to see if there's a shift in the views or opinions as a factor of the dialogue and then now we run a co-creation activity with most of the groups it's an activity that we design to build on what happens in the dialogue so the dialogue kind of primes you for those next steps and then we do an activity that helps you really move into those next steps and that might be as unstructured as brainstorm a few ideas or it might be so structured that we're going to do some polling and some grouping of ideas and do some consensus building on specific questions or specific concepts we back at the toolbox right a report this is a human subjects research project so we collect data on the transcripts of the dialogue that has had the co-creation activity the different pre and post responses to our survey we write a report that reflects on what we've observed for the group and we give it to the group and we usually have a breakout or reflection with the leadership or the group itself and we have some relationships with different groups or we iterate through this process so it's not just a one off but as the group is engaged in a life cycle let's say like a six year grant or the development of a center across years where we can come in at different points and investigate different aspects of the collaboration excellent you know it sounds like you really ought to run this with some of our government officials at this point seems like they could use use that kind of learning to collaborate better but I do I do appreciate that I'm currently involved in an overseeing evaluation of a very strong cross disciplinary project and I see that the team leaders face these challenges all the time of helping people from within outside the university understand what it is they're doing why they're doing it just how they need to approach it they're they're dealing with native Hawaiian communities are dealing with graduate students are doing senior faculty from different campuses from different departments from rather different segments sectors of the university from statewide departments so yeah it's it's I see the value of what what it is you do here and the first hand I'm seeing that that need so that's wonderful it's no it's very exciting and this toolbox is available sort of services are available freely to people who sort of call you up and say hey I need some help I mean how does that work yeah so we have a website toolbox project or toolbox hyphen project or and there's a little box on the side and you can fill out that box or you can send myself or Michael or work an email and then we can get back to you about different tailored services that we can do for your group everything from we've done some virtual workshops where we facilitate from here in your group is either all in one place or distributed locally or globally or we come in in person and run workshops with you as well well it sounds very very exciting to hear this and I'm sure it's a long way from from dealing with nanotechnology but it certainly sounds like you've had an interesting career pathway here let's before we wrap it up let's let's say a little bit about a comment you said to me when we were talking earlier about resilience and flexibility and the relationship between those two characteristics yeah yeah so in order I think to have one of these careers and more and more careers are gonna look like this we're gonna move from different types of positions use our different skills in different ways it's really necessary that we know how to handle difficult moments that we know how to handle failure that we know how to handle challenges and move past them but also have the flexibility to let's say pursue training and being more resilient to have the flexibility to consider different ways that our skills can be applied to have the flexibility to change the way we work or think in different paradigms or reframe the way our skills look and so keeping in mind those two being resilient being able to handle challenges and changes but also being able to be flexible they're really tied together and they're not just skills that you use at work their skills that you use at home and in your everyday life too so nurturing your ability to be flexible to be resilient to find those activities that nourish those things for you that lets you kind of grow in those spaces give you the space to think give you the space to reflect are really important as well super that's a great wrap up for this this discussion here Stephanie and we are out of time now so but it's been both enjoyable and informative chatting with you and learning more about what what you do here I certainly wish you the best of luck and I might might well be in touch to or put our people in touch with you because it sounds like a it might be a very useful tool for them so we've had another episode of likeable science here on Friday afternoon Stephanie Vasco joined us from Michigan State thank you so much Stephanie and we'll see you next week