Would you provide a general background about what your career path has been like to get you to where you are now?

Throughout my entire educational career, I did two things. One was like physics in the classroom, which led me to a PhD. But outside the classroom, I did a lot of political activism. In undergrad, I was very involved with the marriage equality movement in Massachusetts. In grad school at Brandeis University, they have a policy where you can take a year’s leave of absence, and my advisor agreed to let me do that. I spent a year running campaign offices during the 2008 elections. Afterwards, I went back to grad school because doing campaign work made getting a PhD seem easy by comparison. It was definitely the hardest I’ve ever worked. Towards the end of grad school, I was really struggling with how I could put these very different interests together. In my mind, I saw no overlap between the two. I went to a career panel at Brandeis that had one person on it who was from the Union of Concerned Scientists, and she started talking about science policy, and I thought, “What is this world?” It just opened my eyes to a whole possibility and gave me direction in my career in a way that was really exciting.

The Union of Concerned Scientists was launching a new Center for Science and Democracy, which seemed aligned with my interests. I went to their launch event. I actually applied to be the director of the program, which was humorous, but I applied to be the director, and I ended up being an intern. Shoot for the stars, but land with your foot in the door. Right after I finished my PhD, I went to DC. I interned with the Union of Concerned Scientists for a while, which was a really great learning experience. I had also applied for two big DC fellowships: the AAAS fellowship and the Mirzayan fellowship at the National Academy of Sciences. I got an interview with AAAS in my first year, and I bombed it. Luckily, I got the Mirzayan fellowship and learned all the specific ways that I bombed [the AAAS one] such that I was better prepared for the following year. I ended up doing the AAAS fellowship, and I worked in the office of Senator Markey. I learned more in that one year than I did probably the entire rest of my life, about all sorts of topics. It was the most fun professional year of my life. I’m going to say that was my entry point into science policy.

You said that the first interview you did with AAAS didn’t go so well. Are there any tips that you learned that you could give to an early career scientist?

Talk to somebody who went through the interview before. That’s the number one tip. One thing that they don’t teach you in grad school is networking and informational interviews. I think grad students are afraid to cold-email somebody and ask for advice, but it’s actually something people are very open to in DC. If you can go online and find some former fellows who may have worked in spaces that you’re interested in, find their email, and just email them and ask for advice.

The other thing is to get a basic understanding of what science policy is and what it isn’t. I would say I didn’t understand or appreciate the way science and policy interacted. I had a sense of what policy is from an activist perspective, but it turns out public policy is its own field of research. You might think you know everything about it, but you probably don’t know much. The Mirzayan fellowship was really helpful in that it taught me the specific ways in which science and policy interact. Knowing this enabled me to talk with some degree of expertise in the next interview.

When I was working at MIT, I created an online course called Academic Engagement for Public Policy. It’s free on edX. It was designed in two ways: to help get the faculty up to speed on a policy world and to provide all the information I wish I had before going into that interview. That being said, professional societies all have really good [policy] research. I was a member of the American Physical Society and didn’t even realize they had a whole policy arm. AAAS has some really great trainings. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a science network that people can be a part of that teaches a lot about community engagement around science issues. There are a lot of ways to kind of get that training and understanding while you’re still in grad school, so that way you’re more competitive for the fellowships.

Where does your career go after those fellowships?

I think this is the thing. A lot of grad students getting a PhD think that they have learned to do exactly one thing, whatever their research topic is, but don’t realize how broadly applicable the skill of doing research is—in particular, the ability to form a hypothesis and test that hypothesis. When I went to DC, for one of these informational interviews, I met with the senior congressional staffer, who told me that working in policy is a lot like working in science. In policy, you form a hypothesis, and you go out and collect data to support your hypothesis, which is how science works. People from AAAS go into government. For example, I worked in the Senate, a lot of my cohort stayed in the Senate, some of them went on to the executive branch. You could work in the State Department and foreign policy issues with a physics background. If you have an interest in a topic, you have the ability to learn it quickly and then you have the ability to do the kind of analysis and thinking that a lot of people aren’t trained to do. Some people go back to academia and think about how you can find the overlap between academically relevant research and public policy. Some people go into industry and consulting and all those need somebody with technical understanding and policy understanding. Somebody who can read a very technical paper but also communicate it to a senator—that’s a  special skill. Your PhD skills in general open you up to way more careers than you think, but a combination of a PhD plus a science policy fellowship gives you an attractive set of skills to a lot of people.

Would you like to speak more about your work at MIT?

After I left the hill, I went to MIT to start a program, a policy lab. The full title is The Policy Lab at the Center for International Studies. It’s a program that helps faculty engage and develop relationships with public policymakers to both inform public policy with the academic research being conducted at MIT, but also to inform the research with the interests of the policymakers.

Can we pivot a little bit to talk about your work with the scientific citizenship initiative?

The Scientific Citizenship Initiative is a program to teach scientists how to ethically engage with society. It’s a bit broader than science policy. Ethical research standards [are] fundamental, like how do you make decisions about deploying technology that can alter ecosystems? And how do you make decisions about even doing that research in the first place? It’s this broader look at the engagement in interactions between science and society as a whole. It breaks down into two different categories: classroom-style learning and experiential learning. Our classroom courses are workshop-style courses that are interactive and simulation-based and introduce students to concepts in short bursts so that they can do it without taking a lot of time from everything. Our flagship experiential learning program was the fellowship in the Massachusetts State House, similar to AAAS, but it placed STEM graduate students in the State House over the summer part-time. That way, they could get science policy experience and experience engaging with stakeholders, while still maintaining all of their academic responsibilities.

What kinds of communication skills do you try to emphasize on the fellows to communicate what they’re doing effectively to the senators?

Working with policymakers is more than communicating. It’s about how you engage and build relationships and dialogue. There’s this idea-deficit model of engagement. It’s a prevalent idea among scientists that, if policymakers only knew and understood what we knew, they would make the decisions that we would make, which are the “right” decisions. And one of the big things we teach students is that science policy recommendations inherently involve both scientific input and values input. You can’t make a recommendation without adding a layer of values to that recommendation. There’s no value-neutral policy recommendation.

There’s research that shows that, if you confront somebody who has a hardened belief system with just facts to try to convince them otherwise, they actually become more assured of their position. Scientists’ default is, “If I just present you with the evidence, you’ll agree with me.” That’s not how human psychology works. Before you can ever hope to sort of change people’s minds, something you have to do first is meet them where they are and be willing to understand their perspective.

Do you find it’s difficult for scientists to recognize their own values that they’re bringing to the table?

Yes, and one of the big reasons is selection bias. They’re surrounded by people who have a lot of shared values. You think that the world has those values, or that those values are the “correct” ones. It makes it harder to identify them because they seem so natural to you. In the same way, it makes it hard to identify your broader skill set because everybody around you has the same skill set. Everybody around you knows how to do research; therefore, the world knows how to do research. That’s not true. It’s confirmation bias. Everybody has biases, values that make them view some data as more important than others, etc. Scientists view themselves as being unbiased, and it’s true we do our best to eliminate bias and research. But we are far from unbiased when we think about how the world should work, right?

Could you tell us about your career path, and how you made science writing work as a career? 

I’ve always been interested in science. I was a biology major, focused on marine ecology. That was back in the 1970s. Over a period of a few years, the thrill kind of went away. I traveled around the world for a while, and when I got back, my friends told me that my letters were really well written and that I was a good writer. I’d never thought about writing before but decided it would be fun to actually write about science. I went back to school and got a master’s degree in journalism.

For 20 years, I was doing science journalism. It has a lot of the thrills of science without a lot of the hassles. I’ve always been amazed by all the parallels between journalism and science and journalists and scientists. I think both groups are very curious. Both groups want to get at the truth. Both groups demand evidence before they report on something. Being a science journalist allowed me to dabble in science and have the fun of learning something new every day, sort of like being in graduate school with no particular focus.

Journalism went through some tough times in the 1990s and early 2000s, and I decided to take a chance and leave the field. The next opportunity that popped up that looked interesting was science policy. I joined a think tank. Science policy was really interesting because you think about how science can actually inform decisions that affect lots of people through policies and laws and regulations, and things like that. 

Less than a year later, Obama had gotten elected. At that point, I got an invitation to join the government and do science communications work within the government. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do that. I was sort of having fun in the think tank world but luckily made the decision to take the leap. It’s always stressful to jump into a new domain like, “Am I going to be terrible? And do I have the skills to do this?” I’m not a PhD scientist, but I’m a good communicator. This was a communications job in the White House Office of Science Technology Policy. Admittedly, I was not crazy about the idea of being a public affairs person. But I thought if I’m ever going to do it, I’m going to do it as a public affairs person for the White House.

Was that the first point where you were sort of a liaison between actual scientists and journalists?

Yes, exactly. I learned over time how to be a good communications professional, mediating the relationship between scientists and journalists and between parts of the administration in the executive branch and other branches of the government, like Congress. Unlike a think tank where you’re thinking about policy and putting out reports and hoping someone will listen and read, in government you actually have influence you can pull. You can make headway on regulations. You can have sway in executive orders. There’s ways that you can actually make change happen on a large scale, but there are things you got to do right to make that happen.

But I learned for all the talk about science that’s at the table, it turns out science isn’t the only thing at the table. You wouldn’t want to live in a world where solely science influences all the decisions because there’s other things that need to come into play. There’s all kinds of values and other stakeholders out there who have legitimate ways of looking at the world than how the cold science would look at it. Learning how to negotiate that process and make sure science, in its most important opportunities, has influence is important but not necessarily expecting to “win” so that science carries the day every time.

Finally, the administration ends, and I had this opportunity to get into the nonprofit world where I can do something that’s really mission-oriented: about science and about journalism. How about a service that helps connect reporters with the right kind of scientists to talk to for an interview and get the scientific expertise and context that would help them write or produce a better story? It was something that a few of us in journalism had thought about on and off for many years, but no one had ever found funding for a new program.

When you were a reporter, you covered many controversial science issues, including those involving genetics, like cloning, GMOs direct-to-consumer testing. How did you make sure that the scientist’s mission was portrayed properly to the public, but at the same time, the societal concerns about these new technologies were also addressed?

I have a peculiar attraction to science stories where the science raises societal or ethical issues. I think science journalism in general has evolved a lot over the last several decades, and I personally evolved as well. If you look at science writing back in the 1980s, it was like, “Wow, scientists have discovered this. Scientists have done that.” Gradually, science reporting took on a little bit more of a critical view, more of a trait of journalism generally.

I came into journalism, generally appreciating science as a way of knowing, learning, and making progress. It seemed like a responsible thing to do to address those things in a balance, and the way to do it is just to talk to as many people as possible. It’s all in the reporting. So, you talk to the scientists, who often are honest about the pros and cons but generally advocate for their science. Then you talk to the people who have issues with it. What you don’t want to do is end up in the false equivalence trap. It’s not just a battle of ideologies. It is a battle of evidence. I always felt like it was my job as a reporter to do sufficient reporting so that I felt like I had a pretty good sense of what the balance of evidence was out there and reflected that in my stories.

What advice do you have for scientists when they’re talking with the media?

You have to be clear who you’re representing. Are you representing yourself? Are you representing the agency you work with? I would hope scientists feel some responsibility to share with the public what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, if for no other reason than the self-interest of building public support, so the funding stream is there to follow their hearts. However, there are reasons that people want others to appreciate science that goes beyond your own self-interest and even goes beyond building support for evidence-based policy-making. It is a science. It’s a beautiful thing.

Why is it important for scientists to explain the complexities of their work to the media?

I think the journalists are the mediator. Who they really need to be explaining to is the public, and journalism is one way to do that. A lot of the public consumes news. Scientists should also, if they are so inclined and have the skills, talk directly to the public. Go to the public library, to schools. You can give talks. But journalism is a convenient set of practices that helps scientists make contact with the public. One way for those scientists to move the needle on public behavior is through journalism. Again, it is not the only thing. But when the complexities and evidence are missing, I think people are more likely to make bad decisions. Those decisions can be anything from something personal, like what to do about your health, to big things, like who you should vote for and what kind of policies you should support. If we could inject a little more evidence and complexity into the decision-making process at every level, I think that would be good.

What are the biggest challenges for science communication in the future?

I think one big challenge is the scientists. Scientists are going to be challenged with the time and effort it takes to actually explain their work in a way that’s useful to the public, whether it’s through journalism or through some other channel. It’s difficult. It’s a professional skill that journalists spend their lives honing. You, as a scientist, don’t have time to become an expert in that. It’s one reason to go through a mediator as opposed to just going out into the middle of the public square and talking to people straight out. Even in talking to journalists, it’s a lot of work to figure out how to say things free of jargon, free of oversimplification, and free of overstatement. One of the exercises we put scientists through when we train them in how to talk to journalists is to use the 100 most commonly used words in the English language and only use those. “A rocket is like a go-up machine” or something like that. You can’t even say the word “rocket.” It’s hard to do. It takes time and effort and a commitment to communication.

In the Paths to Science Policy series, we talk to individuals who have a passion for science policy and are active in advocacy through their various roles and careers. The series aims to inform and guide early career scientists interested in science policy. This series is brought to you by the GSA Early Care­er Scientist Policy and Advocacy Subcommittee.

The following transcript is from my conversation with Dr. Adriana Bankston, a Senior Fellow in Science Policy at the Federation of American Scientists, who is also the Membership Engagement Chair with AAAS Section X, and immediate past CEO & Managing Publisher for the Journal of Science Policy & Governance (JSPG). Here we discuss different traits commonly­ found in successful policy and advocacy fellowship applicants, various approaches for building one’s network, ways to transition into a policy and advocacy role from an academic background, and the importance of a dependable leader in any discipline.

One of the major takeaways I’ve learned from other interviews of yours is that your Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Policy & Advocacy Fellowship was a major door opener for your interest in policy and advocacy. Many international societies offer similar fellowships. What types of traits are necessary for an application to get a candidate to that next step and be selected for these programs?

Having an interest in a specific policy area and following that passion can be a good strategy. But you also have to be flexible once you get into the fellowship, as you may work on projects that you didn’t anticipate, and you need to think on your feet.

In preparation for applying, engaging in activities that show your commitment to a career in science policy is important, such as writing for a non-academic outlet and organizing policy events.

When I applied for the SfN Policy & Advocacy Fellowship, I had advocated for research policy for several years. I had a good story to tell, since I had previously engaged in advocacy activities, and could articulate why the fellowship was a clear next step for me to build upon these experiences and advance my career.

So when applying for policy fellowships, you need to be able to say why you want to go into policy, how the fellowship will help you move forward, and what your career goal is. Your goals or policy interests may change, but having a direction at the outset can go a long way.

In the “Beyond the Thesis” podcast, you share the importance of getting involved and gaining momentum by building your network early. But not everyone may have that network innately. What soft skills were necessary for you to reach out and start building your professional network?

Honestly, you learn by doing it. Because scientists don’t tend to be very social, and policy is a very people-oriented field, you have to get used to the idea that you will always be talking to people. Start small, such as with your peers, and present on your policy interests in trusted circles.

If you can find a specific policy area that you are passionate about, it will likely make it easier to talk in front of people. That’s how I came out of my shell and forced myself to get out of my comfort zone. If somebody invited me to speak, I would accept and figure it out later. So, sometimes you just have to say yes to an opportunity. While I’m generally pretty shy, if they asked me to talk about the future STEM pipeline, I would do it anytime because that’s what I’m interested in.

Relatedly, when meeting with science policy professionals for informational interviews, start with your current network and build on that. When requesting these meetings, have clear goals and know what you want to get from the conversation and be respectful of their time.

So your recommendation, from what I’m gathering, is that if an opportunity comes just rip off the band aid and go full force right into it?

That’s correct. When I was starting out, I wouldn’t say no to any opportunity. And even if it was a small opportunity, I would take the time to do it well. I believe that the more you do things well, the more people see you, and you build your reputation on that. It feeds on itself. I started small, by talking to graduate students about policy topics and speaking on these topics in spaces that felt safe. I would recommend giving a couple of talks within your circle and seeing how it goes, but also don’t be afraid to take on larger opportunities if they come along even if you don’t feel ready. But always be prepared to do well in even the smallest event because you never know who is there. And you want to do a good job for yourself too. So it’s like everything else— practice your talking points beforehand.

How can a science writer transition to a more policy-oriented style of writing?

One avenue is to educate yourself by getting practice in policy writing and submitting to journals like JSPG which provides training components. Writing policy publications is a good exercise in thinking and formulating arguments on policy issues within a larger societal context. This is why I think more academic style outlets like JSPG are valuable. I would also think about this from the audience standpoint. If you’re giving this to your legislator, what would they want to read about that is timely and relevant? And how do I make it easy for them to understand my main points and asks?

Another avenue is to consider policy implementation. If you’re writing for a magazine and want to get the piece in front of your local representative, developing non-academic writing skills comes in handy. Your message needs to be very concise and often delivered within a short timeline, so you have to be ready to push out a message to Capitol Hill, for example, possibly even within 24–48 hours. Learning to develop a written paragraph or longer piece on the spot on an issue that legislative staff will care about is a good skill for mastering policy writing. 

What insights have you gleaned from your mentors, and as you have become a mentor yourself, that you could distill down and share with other individuals who are now stepping up into a mentorship and leadership role?

I think the most important thing for a supervisor or mentor is to support people in what they want to do, and not what you want them to do.

This is not always an easy thing to do. As a supervisor, you need to make sure that things are moving forward in the best interest of the organization while making sure that individual needs are getting fulfilled. It is a balance between elevating organizational priorities while building people up at the same time. Those people will appreciate working on something they are interested in while building their resume and serving multiple interests.

I like to believe there’s a certain degree of tenacity and altruism shared amongst all individuals pursuing a role in policy and advocacy. These individuals will strive to bolster their cause and do everything in their power to support those sharing the same set of values. Do you agree with the sentiment? And if so, what other traits or qualities of an individual are necessary to succeed in the realm of policy and advocacy?

Going to medical school was my childhood dream because I wanted to do something for other people, and to serve the greater good. I realized that working in science policy fulfills the same needs for me. Policy making as a field is very collaborative and every person’s contribution matters, and a lot comes down to your own accountability. Moral integrity is key, so if say that you are going to do something, then do it. Be dependable and a good team player. When you have a section of a letter to the Hill assigned to you within a certain timeframe, that needs to be done in order for the letter to be sent on time. If you are part of a good team, your work will be valued and be part of the final product. But you have to do the work yourself and do it well to show your contribution to a collective endeavor.

I also want to make a point about adaptability. Sometimes you have to quickly write a statement for your organization on a recent policy development on the Hill which can be exciting. I think that keeps it interesting, that adrenaline rush, but also you have to be able to adapt and realize that your day is not in your control. You may have to drop what you had planned for that day if required and help with an urgent task to serve your organization’s needs.

Do you have any closing remarks?

I want to encourage young people to get your voice out there and into relevant spaces. Just because you are an early career scientist, it does not mean that people do not care about what you have to say. On the contrary, ou bring a lot to the table, and most policymakers and their staff like to hear from you. So don’t be afraid to speak up on policy issues that you care about and you think they should address for their constituents.