Posts in: Reflections

By Dr. Amanda Stanley, Executive Director of COMPASS, and Dr. Laura Lindenfeld, Executive Director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science When you’re addressing urgent, complex problems, it can be hard to step back and look around. Even though every day we work to help scientists reach beyond the ivory tower to communicate their research more e...

When we work with scientists to clarify their key messages and to think about their audiences, we’ll often challenge them to think, “why this, why now, why you?” Why is this problem or issue so compelling? Why does your audience need to know about it now? And why are you the one to share this science? What makes you uniquely authoritative and credible? We ...

In our trainings, and on this blog, we talk a lot about the importance of getting to know your audience. As science communication trainers, we also need tools that help us get to know our audience! But sometimes it’s just not possible to gather that information ahead of time. We know that this is something that many scientists struggle with as well—whether you ...

What’s one way to get the attention of adults and children alike? Say the magic words: “Once upon a time….” Of course, those words aren’t magic in and of themselves. It’s what they signal to people that’s important. When we hear that phrase, we know that a story is coming, and as humans, we are primed to pay attention to stories. Stories, and how t...

At last week’s Sackler Colloquium at the National Academy of Sciences, while absorbing the latest research on the science of science communication, I pondered how rapidly the world is changing - and how much COMPASS trainings have also changed to address the urgent challenges of today. COMPASS workshops teach communication tools: the simple but powerful Messag...

Dr. Kim Nicholas is our guest author this week; Kim is an Associate Professor at Lund University in Sweden, and is one of the 2017 Vega Fellows, a program to provide science communication and leadership skills to scientists working on environment, climate, and sustainability topics in countries around the Baltic Sea. Our Nancy Baron and Sarah Sunu met Kim at the Ve...