Science Sam

Interview Transcripts

What is your scientific background?
I did my undergraduate degree at University of Toronto; a neuroscience specialist and cell and molecular biology major. I did research in neurodegenerative diseases in undergrad and some dry lab psych research. I actually didn’t do a Masters, I entered as a Masters student and reclassified. This is common in Canada and leaves you with a longer funding period, you can also take all your work over with you. Now I’m doing a PhD in the Department of Molecular Genetics at University of Toronto.
Where in the time line did you become interested in science communication?
I’ve always liked teaching, since I was a kid I’ve been mentoring and teaching as much as I can. I think they go hand in hand. I formally started efforts in science communication 3-4 years ago.
Is that when you started your instagram?
No, my Instagram is actually only about a year old but I’ve been on twitter for a while. I started writing tweets for a non-profit organization 3 years ago at the beginning of my PhD. I guess that’s my formal start, but I’ve been doing it for ever.
So I wasn’t aware you’ve been on twitter for so long because I know you from your Instagram. I was wondering what made you pick that platform 1 year ago?
You asked so I’m going to give the full answer. I’ve been on twitter for 3 times as longer but my Instagram following is 3 times bigger. What I was finding on twitter was that I was getting incredibly helpful connections but mostly with other scientists and communicators. Twitter isn’t really popular with our- er you’re younger than me but I’m going to lump us together- ages. Do any of your friends use Twitter?
I have two or three who are in Masters or PhD that use it.
But for social or personal reasons? No one really uses twitter in our generation, but academic twitter is huge. Scientists and anyone in communications, they’re on twitter If you want to be in comms and you’re not on Twitter, you should should get on it. Twitter was useful for networking but I wanted, as a communicator, to reach people not in science. I wanted to change attitudes and perceptions of scientists. I wanted people to see us as friendly and normal people that they can talk to when they read sketchy news. Now they can ask an expert who seems like a friend. So I asked myself, where are the rest of people, where are non scientists? They’re on Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube. Instagram has a longer half life per post, so your post will continue to gain likes for a week while a tweet is dead like 10 seconds after you post it.
And I find with tweets too, it can be difficult to summarize everything in 140 characters.
Exactly! I’ve had debates with people on twitter and they go sour so fast. You’re being so brief so you’re really blunt. While on Instagram I’m doing video, and nice pretty pictures and long explanations where I’m commenting back. There is just so much room for personality. I’ve never had fights on Instagram. But I have on twitter. It just escalates so quickly in 140 characters.
So would you say your audience is non scientists?
On Instagram, not necessarily. I don’t know the exact demographics but anecdotally I have a lot of scientists, a lot of inspiring scientists like undergrads and high school students and they reach out often.
Like me haha
No! you have stuff figured out, you don’t need me. But the high school students need guidance. I get a high school student messaging me every few days.
That’s great!
And there are non-scientists that come across because I try and give the angle of fashion and trendy and cute and aesthetics. My pictures are cute so I try to pull in the non-scientists and through my friends friends [pulls in non scientists through friends-friends]. So it’s split pretty evenly I’d say.So when you started 3-4 years ago kind of getting into science communication, did you have a science communicator that you looked up to or aspired to be? Was there anyone in your life that inspired you to start sci comm?
I had a lot of people encouraging me but in terms of people I wanted to emulate, not so much. Which was kind of the point. Not that I haven’t been inspired, of course I have. I grew up on Bill Nye, I love Bill Nye, I think he’s great. But now I see the way he interacts with people and I’m not a fan of it and I also think it’s a bit damaging. He’s kind of a cheerleader for other scientists. If you’re a scientist you love Bill Nye because of the way he talks -kind of inflammatory- but I wanted to be someone I didn’t think exists [in main stream]: A young female who doesn’t look like a typical scientist No bow tie.
No bow tie. Yeah! And you want to kind of be - do you watch big bang theory?- we wanted people who weren’t like Sheldon and…whatever there names are. There were people to take inspiration from but no one I wanted to be the same as. I think there was a need to represent people like us, just normal girls. Normal people too, not just women. Normal people, I have a normal life, I have friends that aren’t scientists, I’m normal to talk to…besides that I ramble a lot.
I think that’s a normal thing
Yeah haha I guess it is. I get too excited about this. (No me too, I’m so happy we could meet) But I’m glad you agree because you have so much potential left in your career. You’re starting early in your career and that’s beautiful, it’s going to make you so successful.
I find with some of the people, a lot of people in my circle- probably much like you, are other scientists- and the ones they love are Neil degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. Those people can be demeaning or inflammatory to people who believe non-science science. And I think that’s the last thing we need.
Yes! And maybe if I’m with my best friend, or my lab-mates, we’ll let out “ugh how do people believe this, it’s ridiculous!”. But then is it ridiculous? It’s our fault that we don’t communicate our stuff properly. We are so stupid and naïve if we get mad at people for not understanding when we don’t share our info. Everything is behind a paywall in horrible jargon. I can barely understand it and I’ve been in science my whole life! I try not to get mad and always be very inclusive. I edit my posts for a long time. Changing any language that could be taken negatively, to a more inclusive language. Even still people still sometime give criticism and I try to learn from it always.
Being in the public eye is hard.
Yeah, and you can’t please everyone.
So recently you were at the stem cell conference in Boston.
Yeah! In Boston, haha my life is so public. I overshare!
You had a couple Instagram stories that were surprising but made sense to me. Where you were attending talks about how real people experience real damage from fake science. Specifically, stem cell centres were popping up that don’t work but they take people’s money and do procedures to them. Why do you think media outlets often hype up scientific results and make such extravagant conclusions? Is that where these things stem from?
I don’t want to blame media too much, were in a click bait era. I started saying I will never give a hype-y title but now when I’m writing tweets I kind of- well we try and say “Hope not Hype”- but you kind of do this spin because you have seven words, I forget but there’s this limit where people only read the first few words. So You kind of have to [be click bait-y] to an extent. I think media is ok…major media is ok. Then there’s all the crappy ones. The issue with the fake clinics is people will make a website- you and I right now could make a website that could offer a stem cell treatment, or new supplement or new facial to be young, and there’s really no regulation if its not a drug or food item: it fits in an unregulated region. There’s no law against it, it’s not technically illegal. People make these websites and they’ll even have real doctors performing these procedures. And the US has the most of these types of situations. Canada has some too but not as many. Real Drs. will do this and its not considered illegal
It’s not malpractice?
I’m not sure, I’m sure it’s illegal in some ways but they still exist. The really dramatic ones are in countries where there’s no law. So I don’t think it’s the media too much. I think the media primes people, gets them excited enough. So now people are like “cool you study stem cells, can you cure my disease?”.
Yeah I was gonna say you’ve even gotten messages from people before being like “I don’t care about the law”
Yeah! So the media primes them And in all these hopeful articles we have to be writing “but we aren’t there yet”. Because then people when they go and see these clinics they think “oh yeah I read in the Globe and Mail that this is a thing!” Did I answer your question?
Yeah, adding the “but were not there yet is important”.
Yeah and the “hope without the hype” has to be stronger. Can I add one more thing? I would want my legacy to be stop teaching biology about health. Biology and medicine are different, biology and health science are different. What you’re studying, what I’m studying, were just asking the why and how? And if people care about space and it’s so far away, people should care about the why and how of their bodies. We just always do the health spin because we’re lazy. Its easier. So if we stop giving the health spin all the time we won’t even have to say “but we’re not there yet” because we’ll always be framing the story as what it really is.
I get that all the time in my research. I was just recently at CSM conference, which is why I’m in the area...
Ed yong was there!
Yeah! I’m actually getting a phone interview with him for this project.
OMG can you share that with me!
Yes of course!
Can you share this [current interview] with me too?
Yep! Of course. Even in our field, I had people coming up to me – and I study very basic “How viruses build proteins and infect the cell and take it over”- and even then people were like “well what’s the clinical spin on this? And I had to say “there isn’t one, sorry”. I have to be like “drug targets…maybe?”
I think it’s an epidemic in science, especially biology. Even when I’m communicating-and I’m sure you do this too- I do the health spin because you’re trying to pull people in. But I strive not to, if I can get away without it, I don’t. But it’s kind of an epidemic specific to biology. No other field is that way. Space is about space-people love space science, NASA does so well but it’s relatively…like it’s usefull! I’m not saying it isn’t...but it’s not as useful as some biology things could be. But I think it’s also the funding crisis that has people trying to pull medical relevance out of their biology which kind of exacerbates the issue actually. And this is what I blame the media for. Giving the health spin, not over hyping. People in their recreational time don’t want to hear about the ways they’re going to die from all theses diseases so how are people going to enjoy learning about it if we always make it about death and disease.
So on the note of sketchy science and bad news articles that overhype and blatantly lie or spin it to draw false conclusions. Do you have any tips on how to determine if an article is exaggerating the conclusions from the scientific article? Especially for people in the general public, people who have never taken a science course.
That’s really tough. See it’s tough to put the burden on the reader to go look it up. Where would they even look?
Exactly…one I can think of is inflammatory or dramatic language.
In that realm, any absolutes or anything that sounds too certain is probably fake. Real science is always about probabilities. “This is likely true” or whatever. The other thing is you should see…er no. If it’s something so big it should be..no, I dunno. It should be from a really reputable journal. You should see it in many of the top news outlets. If you’re only seeing it in random news articles probably its bad, but that’s hard to gauge. I don’t have any good tips. My best tip is to ask a scientist because that’s a lot easier. But I don’t have a good tip for…it’s a good question, I need more time. It would be great to have a system, or an endorsement system but you could see how that could go wrong too.
I find a lot of scientists in academia are often against popular science because it talks too much in absolutes and that can be hard too.
It would be nice to have- I guess you should look if it has quotations from the researchers. The simplest thing you can do, if the article you're reading mentions a study but doesn’t link to the study, I would say it’s garbage. That’s a pretty standard thing in journalism. You should always mention the study, if its not mentioned in a way you could google it and find it…probably not legit. If you did google it and find it, you would want to make sure that one of the authors on the paper was quoted on the article. If Ed Yong was writing an article, he can get that scientist on the phone…and I trust Ed Yong.
So science communicators have to bridge a fine line between giving too much info and making it jargon-y versus trying to make conclusions more relevant than they are. Where do you think that sweet spot lies? How do you step away from talking about FACS and calling it a ‘cell counter’[on Instagram]. How do you make it more palatable? My philosophy is not to teach people science facts. I think its pretty useless- that’s not true it is useful but I think a lot of people do it. And I think its not valuable for the reader, for someone who is never going to work in a lab is not going to need to know what FACS is. What is useful for them is to teach scientific ways of thinking. Instead of saying FACs counts cells, I can say I am trying to identify a stem cell, before testing it any other way, and its going to shine a light and I can count it. That’s how I know I have a stem cell if it shines a bright light from the protein. You then instead show them what your using the technique for and why that’s interesting. So that I’m hoping you can start to train or condition people that ‘oh if someone’s saying they know they have a stem cell, I wonder how they know, I wonder if they counted fluorescence or cells that are shining bright’. I say that and then I have people messaging me the next day asking me if my cells were red. “Did you see your red cells?”. To me that’s so much better, they know what I’m looking for, they know what goes into finding a fact. The fine line for me is don’t talk about the technique, talk about the value of it. Teach people what goes into finding a fact instead of teaching that fact.
That’s a great answer.
I don’t care about teaching science, I care about teaching about research, what goes into scientific method because its beautiful. All of us in science love it, so we should share it.
Kind of the same question maybe, or might have the same answer. Science, especially the science we do such as cell and systems biology, can be very reductionist, focusing on solely on one part of a much larger system within a much larger system. What do you think is the key to get the message across? I speak specifically to how you’ve been able to take such a complex topic like brain stem cells into the “grandma cell” which is very easily accessible. Even for me, I’m in viruses so I know nothing about the brain, its made neuroscience more accessible to me which is really cool. How did you come up with that…was it you or your lab?
No, that one was me. I think I’m lucky that I have a lot of friends that are patient and they let me explain things to them. And even if you don’t explain to actual friends just saying it out loud and actually reducing your own science to its parts. What I started to see as I started explaining it, is I started to explain a hierarchy. I’m trying to explain cells like a hierarchy and they’re [her friends] looking confused. So I’m like ok, they don’t understand this. So ok, what looks the same as this hierarchy that they know about? I thought a family tree, and I really search for analogies all the time so that’s the short answer. Search for analogy that people know about, and every time I make and analogy I get good feedback. Pretty much anything you have to explain, consider if there is a good analogy. Don’t hammer the analogy too much, sometimes it doesn’t work when you really think about it. Think it through and know its limitations. Then it can be really fun because you can say “but unlike a grandma...” and you can really use it for teaching so… yeah, finding the analogy and you find those analogies by looking at your own science for its parts but not with your science lens/eyes.
And one thing I’m interested in when I hear you're so active on Instagram and you post pictures of your microscopy which I think is awesome. I always wonder, do you get flack from your lab for posting stuff that might be unpublished, or maybe from the senior scientists that think your work is silly or stuff like that, are you worried about scooping?
For scooping were ok. The grandma cell is actually very rare cell type that not many labs study and its really hard to work with so they can’t scoop me, even if they tried. I’m also careful not to show too much info. Sometimes people will DM me and I’ll give them more info there. I actually share a lot but I sometimes blur things or exclude a part from the picture, so I’m actually kind of cautious about that. Ill show in my story figures from my upcoming manuscript but at that point its done enough that I’m not worried. In terms of getting flack-judgements-from other people. People don’t take communications seriously and can you imagine me, a girly looking girl and I’m in the lab taking a selfie and someone walks in…
I feel so bad, I think it was just a day or two ago you posted a picture of the place you take selfies in saying “this is where I go so people don’t make fun of me”.
Yes, exactly. And it's such bad lighting too! All the good lighting is exposed [in the lab], that’s why I do a lot of stuff at night. At the end of the day we need to show our faces. I can justify why I’m taking a selfie. I’m not a narcissist, I’m actually pretty self conscious, like most people...I don’t think I’m hot shit. But people want to see your face to know your real and genuine. So I know I have to do that. I justify it but people will make fun of me if they see it. Most of my lab is super supportive though, and they’ll even be like “Hey want me to take a picture of you?” and I’ll be like “Yes please! I need pictures!” and they’ll let me take pictures of them and they’re in my stories. One time my supervisor, we were at a conference and I was doing a selfie video to explain the session I was just in for Instagram story. He walked by and he didn’t even know the word for selfie because he’s so old and he said “Are you taking pictures of yourself?” and he laughed and walked away and I was like “He doesn’t know that I’m [on Instagram]”.
Does he know about your Instagram account?
I don’t think so but I think he’d be supportive. He is very much about outreach, communicating and storytelling. I actually learned so much from him...he is soo.…like you need to hear him talk, he’s amazing. He’s always giving us feed back for our presentations. I think he would think the amount of time I’m on my phone is too much. But it keeps me motivated and I know its important so I don’t care. But you will get the same push back.
So even though I don’t communicate about my personal science. iGEM is all about science communication. So by being one of the main group leaders, or whatever, I’m on my phone almost all the time taking pictures in the lab and getting my PhD mentor to take pictures of me doing stuff. I’m really lucky that both my PI, and who is also the PI of iGEM, [is so into sci comm] but you’ve mentioned people don’t take science communication seriously and he’s gotten flack before from some older scientists in the department for “selling science” too much.
Yeah, it’s really dumb. We are funded by the government and also through taxpayer’s money via the government. So it’s really irresponsible to not communicate what you’re doing. The people whose opinions I care about know that, and are super supportive.
So I guess we talked about this the entire conversation, but I’ll put it out there in case you have any last closing comments. Where do you think science communication is lacking? And how do you think we can improve it?
Great question. I want to ask it to you back, but I’ll go first. I think it’s lacking in “trendiness”, we’re so archaic, and every other part of the world is so much more tech savvy and advanced, using new social media platforms and then you go on some science Instagram and it’s so boring and lame. We just need to be cooler I think, more palatable to younger people because we’re trying to bring those people in. I think if our goal is to bring people into science and change mindsets as much as possible we need to target younger people and if we want to target younger people we need to be cooler. Straight up we need to be trendy. Why aren’t more people live streaming, or taking trendy pictures in the lab? Why aren’t more people on snapchat showing their lab? How come every science video-like you’ll look at one video production agency, you’ll see there food video and there so awesome but their science ones are kind of boring…like whyyy. We just need to make it more fun and get people trusting scientists. People don’t trust us, they think were evil. We bust our asses for everyone and people don’t know that because we don’t invite them in.
I feel like someone who makes science trendy is Scishow on Youtube. It’s Hank Green- do you know who John Green is? He’s written a lot of young adult books- his brother is a biochemist who dropped out of academia to pursue science communication. He runs a bunch of different [shows]. Like Crash Course for school topics but also just Scishow for science news, they have a couple different channels. Biology space…I think they do a really good job of making it fun.
I like Derek Muller of Veratasium. He’s good, he’s really really friendly. I like V Sauce but he kind of has that freakiness to him. Because he’s kind of quirky which works really well, but I think we also want to show more relaxed people in science. Dianna Cowen, Physics girl, she’s cool, fun loving, and chill.
What I love about Scishow is they’ve grown now over the past 5 years and they hire people so can see the faces of scientists. A women covered in tattoos, just regular people talking science.
So that another thing we need, more young and diverse people. All the people right now save Neil deGrasse Tyson, are white. And I’m visibly white too and I recognize that. Yeah, we need to mix it up!
Kind of a silly questions right at the end. Dalhousie iGEM is starting an Instagram soon and I was wondering if you had any tips?
That’s not a silly question! I have so many tips. Probably the most important is to clearly define your goal and your motivation for doing it. I know this is cliché but figure out what that is and it will help develop your brand. If you don’t have good motivation, Instagram is so much work. Every picture takes so much effort, so much work. That if you’re not well motivated, if you don’t know why your doing it, you’ll give up. I have a friend who was so amazing, growing faster than I was and it just became too much work. I think because her motivations were a bit different, not bad, but she just realized it wasn’t worth it. But my motivation was important to me. Even if its keeping me up at night, making me look bad in front of my peers, its worth it. And I think that’s the important thing. Strategically, I think it’s important to read articles on Instagram algorithm. Time of day when you post matters. Normally around 12pm is the best time to post. The matters because how quickly you get likes determines how well your post will do. You always want to be the top post on a tag, and you can get there even if you’re a small channel. I think I’ve been top post over accounts that have 100s of 1000s of followers because I got my likes really quickly or something. Don’t be discouraged if your small starting out. With that said, use hashtags and interact with other accounts.
What are your opinions on Instagram story take overs?
I think they’re fun. Again it depends on your motive. For me, I don’t want anyone to take over my story because mine’s very much my voice.
So what I was thinking for iGEM, we have a lot of different scientists and people on the team. We are such a diverse team, we cross six departments, I was thinking of doing once a week have a person take over for one day and have “a day in the life of a scientist” or “a day in management” to show that everyone in iGEM is a normal person.
I think that’s really cool but- this is not based on evidence, but I’m just giving my thoughts- so I think, you want to get engagements, you want people to comment and like and you want people to reply to your stories in DMs, that helps push you towards explore pages which is how you get seen. Sorry I could go on forever about this. So the things that I notice do best, are ones where I’m being very personal and vulnerable where I’m talking about myself and being very honest. My one concern about takeovers is if it’s too many people, how can they build a connection? As long as you can do it in a way where people are still connecting, or you have like a common narrator that they’re connecting with. Or maybe you do a takeover for a week so people can start to build a bond of sorts. For a week once a month. I think just make sure, however you do the takeover, you do it so that people can still bond with the person. I have a lot of friends that when they follow really big accounts with millions of followers they don’t like their posts because they feel disconnected. Like my friends will follow meme accounts or famous bloggers but they won’t interact because it’s so disconnect, they’re like “they don’t need my like”. But with me my friends will interact because 1) I’m not that big and 2) they feel connected and personally invested in my success. So try and pull people in, almost obligate them, make them feel like they have to support you, because you need their support. Make sure you’re still fostering connection. Always remember that your goal is engagements so you can get on those explore pages. I have just under 7000 followers. So most posts will be seen by a few thousand people, when I’ve made it to the explore page, I can tell because my post was seen by 20000 really quickly, like in a day. So you want that. It doesn’t happen for every post but I try really hard to make it happen. Just be strategic. There’s lots of content on line, and feel free to reach out to me.

Team:Dalhousie/ScienceSam

Interview Transcripts