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Scientists increasingly seek to respond to urgent calls for equity in science but may be unsure how to engage with underserved public groups. Prisons, jails, and detention centers are venues in which scientists may use their educational privilege to serve and empower diverse populations that are underserved by science education and underrepresented in science disciplines. We reversed the lens that traditionally focuses on the benefits of public engagement to the audience by documenting the impacts of delivering science lectures on the scientists who offered seminars to incarcerated people. The scientists who engaged in carceral settings gained professional benefits, shifted their preconceptions of incarcerated people, raised their perceived value of community engagement, and increased their interest in social justice. Some took direct actions for social change. This program could model effective engagement for other underserved groups in our society. We provide guidance to initiate such a program in other institutions.

 

In the ongoing series of Nova Interviews, Challenges Advisory Board member Alan C. Logan meets with thought leaders, scientists, scholars, healthcare professionals, artisans and visionaries concerned about health at the scales of persons, places, and the planet. In this interview, Dr. Nalini M. Nadkarni, of the University of Utah, responds to a set of questions posed by Nova for Challenges. For over forty years, Dr. Nadkarni has been studying the fragility and resiliency of rainforest ecosystems. During this time, Dr. Nadkarni has prioritized science communication with an emphasis on highlighting the interdisciplinary relevancy of research findings. Dr. Nadkarni has worked to promote an integrative way of thinking about the various branches of science and medicine, with an eye toward shifting public policy. Her research career has taken her where only a small minority of scientists have traveled—from remote cloud forests to segregated housing within prison facilities. Dr. Nadkarni successfully challenged the Mattel Corporation to update their globally-recognized toy, Barbie, with women in science in mind. Here, Dr. Nadkarni reflects on the early influences that shaped her career, updates Challenges on the latest directions of her work, and discusses the ways in which the canopy ecosystem can help us understand the complex interconnected challenges of our time. 

This paper is the culmination of several meaning-making activities between an external researcher, PES practitioners, and social scientist researchers who considered the unique contributions that can be made through RPPs on PES (that is, research-practice partnerships on public engagement with science). Based on the experiences from three RPP projects, the group noted that the PES context may be particularly suited to RPPs, and identified the importance of working as thinking-partners who support reciprocal decision-making. Recommendations are made in support of using these approaches to advance practical knowledge-building and reduce shared frustrations about the disconnect between research and practice in PES. 

Abstract In Their Own Words chronicles the stories of scientists who have made great contributions to their fields. These short histories provide our readers a way to learn from and share their experiences. We will publish the results of these conversations in the pages of BioScience and on our podcast, BioScience Talks (http://bioscienceaibs.libsyn.com). This history is with Nalini Nadkarni, professor of biology at the University of Utah. 

Public engagement with science activities need to be extended beyond traditional learning venues (e.g., museums, schools) to increase public access. Scientists are motivated to carry out this work; however, it is difficult to scale up training to support the implementation of engagement activities in non-traditional venues. Such training would need to be applicable to different engagement contexts, while avoiding a “one size fits all” approach. We describe the guiding principles, challenges, and design choices of a training program in the United States to support scientists in designing and implementing audience-specific engagement activities in a range of non-traditional venues. 

The incarcerated population has little or no access to science education programs, STEM resources, or sci-entists. We explored the effects of a low-cost, potentially high-impact informal science education program that enabled NASA scientists to provide astrobiology lectures to adults inside 16 correctional institutions in three states. Post- versus pre-lecture surveys suggest that presentations significantly increased science content knowledge, positively shifted attitudes about science and scientists, increased a sense of science self-identity, and enhanced behavioral intentions about communicating science. These were significant across ethnicity, gender, education level, and institution type, size, location, and state. Men scored higher than women on pre-lecture survey questions. Among men, participants with greater levels of education and White non-Hispanics scored higher than those with less educational attainment and African American and other minority participants. Increases in science content knowledge were greater for women than men and, among men, for those with lower levels of education and African American participants. Women increased more in science identity than did men. Thus, even limited exposure to voluntary, non-credit science lectures delivered by scientists can be an effective way to broker a relationship to science for this underserved public group and can potentially serve as a step to broaden participation in science. 

Scientists are increasingly motivated to engage the public, particularly those who do not or cannot access traditional science education opportunities. Communication researchers have identified shortcomings of the deficit model approach, which assumes that skepticism toward science is based on a lack of information or scientific literacy, and encourage scientists to facilitate open-minded exchange with the public. We describe an ambassador approach, to develop a scientist’s impact identity, which integrates his or her research, personal interests and experiences to achieve societal impacts. The scientist identifies a community or focal group to engage, on the basis of his or her impact identity, learns about that group, and promotes inclusion of all group members by engaging in venues in which that group naturally gathers, rather than in traditional education settings. Focal group members stated that scientists communicated effectively and were responsive to participant questions and ideas. Scientists reported professional and personal benefits from this approach.