Taking Science to the People: A Communication Primer for Scientists and Engineers

5. Reflections of an Engineer/Science Writer

Abby Vogel, PhD, is a communications officer in the Research News office at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she writes about Georgia Tech research discoveries and developments. Vogel also serves as a member of the ieee-usa Communications Committee and as an editor for ieee-usa Today’s Engineer. While she was a graduate student at the University of Maryland conducting biomedical optics research at the National Institutes of Health, Vogel was awarded a fellowship with the aaas Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows program to work at the Richmond Times-Dispatch as a science reporter. In this essay, Vogel describes how her experience as an aaas Mass Media Fellow changed her career path from bioengineer to science writer. 45 5 Reflections of an Engineer/Science Writer Abby Vogel Being a science journalist is difficult. It’s difficult to write without big scientific words, to make a science topic interesting to the average reader, and to ask the right questions during an interview and get an interesting quote. I faced and conquered these challenges during the summer of 2005 as an aaas Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow, sponsored by ieee-usa. The fellowship was a huge change from my “real” life as a doctoral student in biological resources engineering at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. The aaas program offers student scientists and engineers a chance to get out of their labs and work as reporters at newspapers , radio stations, or television stations across the country. It aims to help them sharpen their ability to communicate complex scientific issues to nonscientists and help improve public understanding of science. I applied for the fellowship because I love science and I love writing. And I knew early on that I might not be cut out for a job in academia because I was always more interested in learning about other people’s research projects than digging more deeply into my own. In my ten weeks as a science reporter at the Richmond (va) TimesDispatch , I spent every day working on a new story and learning about new scientific research. During my fellowship, I published fourteen articles on topics as diverse as seismology, paleontology , physics, astronomy, health, birds, nail salons, wind farms, transportation, the space shuttle Discovery, and green-building techniques. The job was difficult but worth it when readers responded to one of my articles with phone calls and e-mails commending me on informing them about a topic that they were unaware of before and asking where they could find more information. I received my first assignment on my first day at the paper. The next issue of the journal Science was going to include an article about earthquakes written by researchers from Virginia Tech. I had to interview the scientists and then find another expert in the field who could verify that the study was novel and brought new information to the public. The next week nasa Langley held a media day for reporters to tell them about research at the Hampton, Virginia, facility —research that would hasten the space shuttle’s return to space after the 2003 Columbia disaster. Seeking an angle that interested me, I talked to many researchers. And I found one using thermal cameras to see cracks and impact damage on the outside of the shuttle during a spacewalk. I even got to interview an astronaut to get his perspective.  reflections of an engineer/science writer 46 That summer I also interviewed a Lynchburg College professor who used mathematical models to predict the winning times for each stage of the Tour de France and a William and Mary biologist who found that female birds were attracted to a mate with the same characteristics as the mates their female friends had chosen. The most challenging assignment I received was to attend an Environmental Protection Agency workshop aimed at teaching nail technicians about the dangers of salon chemicals. The catch: The workshops were taught in Vietnamese. But I had to get the story, so I sat through hours of Vietnamese warnings about the hazards of working in a nail salon. My hard work paid off—the story landed on the front page of the newspaper the following day. An interesting story arose when one of the senior editors asked me to find out when the Virginia Department of Transportation would repave the highway he drove on to get to...