Famed actor Alan Alda spoke at the University of Vermont Feb. 2 about how to get the public to fall in love with science — and why they often don’t. Then, he and a team of communications experts worked with UVM scientists on campus the next day to help them do the same: practice skills to make their research exciting to people outside the academy.
Many people remember Alda from his starring television roles in West Wing and as Army doctor Hawkeye Pierce in the hit series MASH. But communication about science is a topic near to Alda’s heart after more than a decade of hosting the PBS show Scientific American Frontiers. By conducting hundreds of interviews with world-leading researchers for the program, he became dedicated to helping scientists tell their own stories with clarity and vividness.
The relationship begins, he said to an overflow crowd at UVM’s Davis Center, like a blind date. "Can I trust this person?” he said. “Do they have an agenda?” With the right conditions, he said, the awkward first date can transform into a committed relationship.
Alda’s visit marks the launch of a relationship UVM has entered into with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, formed in 2009 at Stony Brook University. The center’s mission is to enhance understanding of science by training the next generation of scientists to communicate powerfully with the public, elected officials, the media, and others outside their own discipline.
Out of your head
To help the scientists understand how jargon can be invisible to themselves — but off-putting to the public — Alda and his team invoked baseball journalism. To open the morning workshops, they posted this paragraph from the New York Times: “In the bottom of the ninth, Jeter worked a one-out walk and stole second. But the Red Sox’s ace reliever Koji Uehara got Ellsbury and Teixeira to strike out swinging to end the game.”
To dedicated readers of the sports pages, this is not only easy to understand, it’s an exciting window into a dramatic moment in one of baseball’s most storied rivalries. But to workshop attendee Gabriela Bucini, a UVM postdoctoral researcher who studied physics as an undergraduate growing up Italy, it sounded like so much gibberish. “Worked a one-out walk,” she said. “What?”
Not only do scientists need to translate their specialized vocabularies to reach public audiences, Alda noted, but they need to pay close attention to the profound — and universal — human need and capacity to tell stories. “What’s at stake? So what?” Alda said. Science is an a unfolding story of tremendous power, he said, but “you have to give us a reason to care about your research.”
Too often, he noted, scientists try to prepare with an inflexible script. To help them “connect emotionally and intellectually,” he said, with whoever their audience is — TV reporter, undergraduate classroom, cocktail party friend, or a National Science Foundation program officer — “you need to enjoy the playful connection with another real person,” Alda said. “Too often we get stuck in our own head.”
To help, Alda Center staff led teams of faculty through theatre-style improvisation exercises that required close attention to the experience and action of others in the room. They also had practice sessions to distill the core of each faculty member's message about their research, and brief lectures on fundamentals of good storytelling. “In most stories, someone wants something very badly and tries to get it,” Elizabeth Bass, director of the Alda Center and longtime science editor of Newsday, said to the gathered scientists, “something hangs in the balance.”
Next steps
The day-long communications workshop drew dozens of science faculty from UVM and other Vermont colleges, including Johnson State and Middlebury. It was the first of several workshops that will be held on campus. Future sessions will include more faculty in the sciences and broaden to other disciplines, including the humanities. As part of the new relationship, UVM is also in discussion with the Alda Center for possible semester-long communications classes developed for graduate students.
Alda’s lecture was part of the Dan and Carole Burack President’s Distinguished Lecture Series. His visit and workshop were hosted by UVM’s Writing in the Disciplines Program, the Vermont Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (VT EPSCoR) and the university’s Office of the Vice President for Research.
