Category Archives: Scio10 Interviews

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.

Today, I asked Princess Ojiaku to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I guess you could say that I was born into a scientific family. My mom is a professor of biology, and my dad was a engineer for some time. My sister and a significant portion of my cousins are all in science-related fields, so it’s almost like science is in my genes. All that home-grown science knowledge helped to push me along the career trajectory I’m on now, and instilled in me a love of science that I want to spread to everyone else!

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I got my B.S. in Biological Sciences from Louisiana State University and was fortunate enough to do two years of undergraduate research in a lab that really cemented my love for research. Even though I loved science and research, I wanted to take a few years off before committing to the long and hard road to the Ph.D. So I moved to Chapel Hill and took a technician position at the University of North Carolina. While there, I started reading lots of science blogs and getting more into the idea of being a science communicator, as I felt that the public needed more people to make science less scary and more accessible. Working as a tech also afforded me more time to get into projects like starting a local girl band called Pink Flag and playing shows for the first time ever. In Fall 2009, I started a Master’s program at North Carolina Central University, and started up my blog, Science with Moxie where I blog about the intersection of my two loves, neuroscience and music.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Most of my time is spent between my research and classwork, my band, and keeping up regular posting on my blog. I also work occasionally on weekends as a museum educator doing science-themed birthday parties for kids. Some goals I have (since 2011 is literally right around the corner) are posting more often on my blog and doing some reconnaissance missions as to what sort of jobs are available for someone with a Biology M.S in science communication/policy/writing/education/advocacy in August when I graduate. (hire me!). I’m heavily considering going back to school too for a Ph.D., but I guess I just need to figure out what my upcoming Master’s degree can do for me first. Other goals are getting out my band ‘s first full-length record and writing lots of new songs. As for longterm goals, I want to stay involved in both science communication and music, so I’m looking forward to discovering all the different opportunities available to combine my love for both.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I love the complete democratic nature of the internet and the fact that anyone can sign up for their own personal electronic pulpit to reach out to interested minds about anything and everything, and do it as anonymously or as publicly as they like. Another thing I love about the Web and the blogosphere is just the fact that people step up to debunk incorrect information or things that need further study in order to be respectably claimed. The most recent and awesome example of this in the science blogosphere was the whole arsenic bacteria thing in which many independent science bloggers managed to critique and electronically peer-review a hot-off-the-presses scientific paper. That whole incident just amazed me because in this age of open and accessible information things like this can be quickly called out by a network of awesome professionals. I think it’s an exciting time to live in when information is disseminated and then processed so quickly, independently, and simultaneously. In my little nerd girl future fantasy, it’s bringing us just a little closer to the ideal of something resembling “absolute truth,” or at least what we can collectively understand of it.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

Blogging keeps me on my toes in the latest of what’s going on in the science world. Researching and writing on topics that are just slightly out of my field helps me become more knowledgeable about my field in particular and better at analyzing thing in general. I feel that Twitter is kind of invaluable for discovering what’s hot in current science and for finding things to blog about. I follow a lot of science-related people on twitter who constantly tweet links that jog the mind and inspire my writing (including this guy named @BoraZ!). So I feel that social networking and reading links that other people post are essential to keeping my blog going with cool and exciting topics.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I first discovered science blogs via subscribing and reading Seed Magazine as an undergraduate. When the ScienceBlogs network started, I would read the blogs on and off. I got more into reading science blogs right before I started my own blog. SciCurious’ blog posts were always the ones that I looked forward to reading the most, and she is definitely a huge inspiration for my own neuroscience blog. I hope my posts are at least half as fun as all of hers are! Someone else cool I got to meet at the conference last year was Joanne Manaster who makes really fun science videos. There are so many creative people doing so many awesome things for science and meeting her (and so many others too!) reminded me of that.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

The best part of ScienceOnline2010 was just getting to mingle and meet so many people in the science blogosphere whose blogs I had been reading for literally years. It was a bit surreal having so many people I admired in one location, all interacting with each other. The whole conference felt so innovative and futuristic from the stream of #scio10-tagged tweets on the screen in the lobby to just the topics being discussed. I think I just took all the enthusiasm and energy of all the people there back to my blog, so I could start carving out my own little contribution to this web of science communication online.

Thank you so much for the interview. And I’ll see you again in two weeks at ScienceOnline2011!

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.

Today, I asked Morgan Giddings to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I am presently situated geographically in the center of North Carolina, specifically the Triangle area. If someone has already done it, then I’m bored with it. If the answers are already known, then I’m looking somewhere else.

My scientific background combines degrees in Physics, Computer Science, and a PhD focused on bioinformatics from UW Madison. After that, I got introduced to proteins and proteomics, and ever since have been tinkering with systems and approaches for combining proteomics, genomics, and computing to do hopefully useful things like helping to annotate the genes on the human genome.

My philosophy is that academic science has boxed itself into a bit of a corner with the direction it’s been headed. The “single pathway or system” focus that worked so well 20 years ago no longer works. We are in the era of “integration” but nobody knows how to do it. I am working on a book that touches on this.

Mid-career I had a realization that we scientists are horrible marketers for our work. I had this realization after co-founding a sustainable lifestyles bike shop, and trying to apply my “academic scientist” mentality to selling bikes. It didn’t work. After re-programming myself to market better, I realized that this also applies to everything I do in running a science lab.

That is the basis of my book “Four Steps To Funding” and another upcoming book, “The Golden Ticket in Science”.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I started in computer science and physics, then jumped ship as I started pursuing a PhD in computer science. I realized that pure computer science was a bit too dry for me. I joined a lab developing DNA sequencing technology, fell in love with combining computers and biology, and never looked back. After developing software for interpreting DNA sequencing data, I moved onto the harder problem of interpreting protein data from Mass spectrometers (so called proteomics). That opened up a lot of interesting projects, including:

– Contributing to a deep annotation of the Human Genome using protein/proteomic data

– Modeling bacterial systems with “agent based models” to uncover the basis of behaviors like chemotaxis and competence switching

– Developing methods to find posttranslational modifications on proteins from mass spectrometry data

– Examining the mechanisms that lead to antibiotic resistance in the bacterium P. aeruginosa

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

My time is split between standard academic duties, and my true passion, which is figuring out the “meaning of life” and writing books about it.

After I finish my next book on science careers, I’ll move onto my most ambitious project, which is a book that ties together consciousness, evolution, computing, and creativity. More on that when the time comes.

I also spend some fair bit of time helping scientists advance in their careers through consulting and training on things like how to get more grants and less rejections.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I love blogging and writing. I love giving talks, and figuring out how to convey a message to an audience for the maximal effect possible.

This is why I think “marketing” is so powerful. Marketers have studied how to convey effective messages to people for as long as there have been goods to sell. In particular, the last 100 years have seen many studies of human behavior in the context of how we receive (or don’t) messages.

While some might only associate marketing with nefarious purposes, I take the strong view that it is a value neutral activity. You can use it to promote bad things or good things.

Since most science is good to some extent, I believe that applying marketing could more effectively convey the value of science to other scientists, and the rest of the populace.

Considering that science funding is ever more in doubt, this couldn’t come a moment too soon. All of us scientists should be out telling people what benefit science brings to their lives, and doing so in the most effective way possible. I believe that if we don’t get our act in gear on this point, then science funding will continue to dwindle.

Hence, I am well on my way to becoming a definitive go-to resource on how to “market” one’s science, whether it is in writing a grant proposal, or talking to a member of congress.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I use blogging both to report on some of my science work, as well as to opine about matters related to “science marketing” and science careers. I use social networks to achieve further reach for some of the ideas, but frankly, I don’t have enough time to do that with regularity.

I find that the blogging (both my own and others’) is essential for forward progress, particularly in discussing matters that don’t get published in journal articles – like how to grow and manage a lab, or how to get a grant funded in a competitive environment.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I discovered them through tweets by Bora Zivkovic, sometime in 2009.

I like A Blog Around The Clock, and a wide variety of other science blogs. I’m more focused on finding blog-posts with relevant content than following specific blogs.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I realized how far I have to go in conveying the notion to my peers that we, as scientists and science communicators, must up our game on “marketing” our work. For example, I attended a session on how to get published with several authors. While it was clear that the authors were ahead of most of the audience in “figuring out” the marketing game for their books, there is a lot of content elsewhere in the world on how to do this successfully that hasn’t filtered into the science community. It was also clear from the questions that were asked by the audience that everyone is still stuck in thinking of book publishing in the traditional model of: get an agent, have the agent find a publisher, then have the publisher publish, promote, and distribute the book.

But things are rapidly changing. For example, e-books are a great alternative to the above model that provide a lot more flexibility to the author (and potentially profit, too). And there are lots of ways to self-publish a physical book as well, without having to go through a “gatekeeper”.

After having self-published my first book, I’d never do it any other way. I can see going with a publisher only if/when I’ve sold enough copies and had enough feedback that I really have strong evidence that it is a concept worth producing thousands of copies of.

In fact publishers are going towards this model as well. They prefer taking successful self-published titles, because it reduces their risk.

But the key to self-publishing is understanding how to market one’s work. Anyone who tries to self publish without understanding that will fail.

So the options for those who wish to publish their ideas in a book, without having to do any promotion or marketing, are becoming very scarce. This means that everyone needs to better learn to market their ideas. By marketing I mean “making the content and message relevant to the audience.”

I’d like to see more discussion on this point at a future conference.

The other thing I notice is that the people who attended the conference are the leaders in science communication. Many scientists are mostly (or completely) oblivious to the rapidly changing nature of science communication. I believe it will be important to spread the message more widely to working scientists as to why modern science communication is so important. I think that the conference could play a role in that.

It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Thanks for the opportunity!

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.

Today, I asked Jennifer Williams to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

Hi Bora, thanks for including me in the ScienceOnline2010 interviews. I am jazzed to hear that plans for 2011 are already in full swing! I definitely want to attend again next year (it will be my 4th year) so I’ll keep the date reserved. Attending is pretty easy for me since I live in the North Carolina Triad. I work & blog for the online company OpenHelix. My PhD and post-doc were in yeast disease research, but for about the last 10 years I have worked virtually either curating for bioscience databases, or creating tutorials on them for OpenHelix.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

To paraphrase Blanch Du Bois, in my career “I have always relied on the encouragement of colleagues” – and it has led me to wonderful jobs that have allowed me to move with my husband’s career, to be both a mother and a scientist, and to accomplish many other professional and personal goals.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Of course my job takes up large amounts of time and it is one that I am passionate about – teaching researchers how to efficiently and effectively use the public databases and other bioscience resources that are freely available online. We just got a paper published on sources (many free) for informal learning in bioinformatics, entitled “OpenHelix: bioinformatics education outside of a different box”. I am passionate about education outside of work as well, and volunteer some of my efforts to the Early College at Guilford College, and try to give career talks whenever and wherever I am invited to do so. As a goal I’d like to be able to promote alternative careers in science, such as those I’ve been involved with.

My main focus and experience is with online work for stay-at-home parents. However I really enjoy learning about any ‘oddball’ ways to be a scientist. Being a tenure-track professor at a research institution just isn’t the best way for everyone to be a scientist: not only aren’t there enough jobs, but it just ISN’T in everyone’s temperament or life-style goals. And science is SUCH a COOL thing to do! I truly believe there is some version of a science career that is absolutely perfect for just about anyone even half way considering it – it is just a matter of finding the perfectly fitting ‘oddball science career’ (Hey, could that be the beginnings of a title for a session? Hmm I wonder…)

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

That’s easy – learning to be better at it! I really related to your interview with Andrea Novicki when she said “As a confirmed introvert, I find blogging difficult.”! I blog as part of my job at OpenHelix & my blog partners, Mary & Trey, are great! They allow me to contribute tips, and other posts when I get the bug, but they are absolute pros at it (Mary has been chosen for inclusion in The Open Laboratory 2008) & I am learning from them. I (of course) also learn new stuff every year at the ScienceOnline conference & I think I may be sowing the seeds of interest (with Mary’s help) in my offspring.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I ended up getting value from every ScienceOnline event that I attended last year, from the Friday night Gala at the RTP headquarters thru the “Connections with mathematics and programming through modeling” session Sunday morning. The thing that I find so remarkable about the conference is how often I refer to it in casual conversations, even 7 months later – there were SO many topics and conversations that were noteworthy both scientifically, and just for life in general. And it is not just last year’s sessions. I’ve been attending for the last 3 years now and I’m still growing & learning based on some of my conversations in years past. I am very much looking forward to ScienceOnline2011!

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.

Today, I asked Stephanie Willen Brown to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m Stephanie Willen Brown, aka CogSciLibrarian living in the Triangle area in North Carolina. I’ve been a librarian since 1996, and I started calling myself the CogSciLibrarian in 2004, when I was the librarian for the School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. I started the blog as a way of sharing cool cognitive science stories and books that I thought my colleagues would enjoy.

My scientific background is limited to that of a librarian, supporting faculty and students working in cognitive science, communications, and psychology over the years. I’d grown up intimidated by math and science, but cognitive / brain / neuroscience is so interesting AND there is so much good, accessible writing about it that I have become a fan.

My current reading interests include the effect of mindfulness on the brain, the development and use of language, and concussions in NFL and other athletes.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’m thrilled to be working at my dream job, as director of the Park Library at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It incorporates many of my interests, such as library science, journalism, marketing, and advertising. I am a consumer of mass media, and I love to be around academics who are studying various aspects mass communication.

My first love is helping students and colleagues find resources that will enhance their research, and the work is double-plus good when it involves subject matter I find interesting as well as amazing library colleagues at the UNC Libraries.

I do miss supporting cognitive and communication science, as I don’t have much interaction with my all-time favorite database PsycINFO. It’s got great content and robust metadata (did you know you could limit your search to age group of subjects studied? Or that you can limit results to just empirical studies or literature reviews?), though it’s not the go-to database of choice for mass communication.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Science needs good public relations right now, and I agree with @ErinBiba’s essay in the May issue of Wired “Why Science Needs to Step Up Its PR Game.” I’d like to play a small part in the merger of science and PR by training public relations professionals to do good research and generally supporting their academic endeavors. Libraries and news* (newspapers, news outlets, etc.) need good public relations too, but that’s for another post.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

One of the great things about my job is that I feel empowered – even obligated! – to read about social networking and participate in various social networks professionally and personally. I promote the Park Library via Twitter (@JoMCParkLib and Facebook and have dabbled in FriendFeed.

I believe we in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication should be teaching our students to use social networks in their professional work, so I think of myself as modeling good professional use of social networks.

I tweet as @CogSciLibrarian as well, which is where I keep up with my science buddies and science news.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I discovered science blogs years ago as I began my own blog, though I read science librarian blogs such as John Dupuis’ Confessions of a Science Librarian more than practicing scientist blogs. I met science documentarian Kerstin Hoppenhaus at ScienceOnline2010 and really enjoy her More Than Honey blog.

I’ve since migrated to Twitter for most of my online / science interactions, and I follow some great science folks there, including @SteveSilberman , @tdelene (DeLene Beeland), @VaughanBell (contributor to Mind Hacks), and my favorite psychology radio show @allinthemind (Australia’s Natasha Mitchell).

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

Gosh, I loved #scio10! It was great to be exposed to so much science in a casual, friendly environment, and I enjoyed spending time with like-minded librarians like Christina Pikas, John Dupuis, and Bonnie Swoger . I was also happy to meet Irtiqa’s Salman Hameed and Tom Linden’s Master’s students in UNC’s Program in Medical & Science Journalism. There were many more as well, but the most amazing aspect of ScienceOnline is the interaction with interesting and interested science, journalism, and library professionals. I have just put #scio11 on my calendar and look forward to meeting more interesting folks!

Thank you so much for the interview. I hope to see you soon, and of course at the next conference in January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.

Today, I asked William Saleu to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

My name is William Saleu and I blog at BomaiCruz. I am from Papua New Guinea (PNG), an independent island nation making up the eastern part of the island of New Guinea which lies immediately north of Australia. I am a research fellow at the Duke University Marine Lab (DUML) in Beaufort, North Carolina.

I am part of a team that studies population structure and species connectivity among invertebrates from hydrothermal vent systems from the western Pacific. Most of our samples were collected from PNG so as you can imagine I have naturally taken up a personal interest in this subject. My ultimate goal is to be able to use the results of this research and other similar work to help identify and design conservation strategies for these unique ecosystems in PNG.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

So one might wonder how I ended up doing this. To answer that question I will have to take you back to my final days as an undergraduate at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG). I was a biophysics major and was almost at the end of my program when I realized that my options for employment after college were very slim and I decided to look at opportunities for post grad research at UPNG. I spoke to my physics advisor but he was not so enthusiastic about having me on his projects but told me to come up with my own project.

I was sitting in a microbiology class when I heard the professor say something about chemosynthetic bacteria and how they were the basis of life at hydrothermal vents but she went on to say that because of the extreme conditions they lived in, not much was known about them as it was very hard to culture them. I also found out then that we had hydrothermal vent systems in PNG that geologists were so interested in studying. This was it, this was the project I was looking for. I decided I was going to build an incubator that would house pressure sensors and thermometers and could go all the way down to the sea floor, collect these bacteria and bring them to the surface at similar conditions to that of their sea floor habitats, little did I know that people in the developed world have already invented deep sea submersibles and remotely operated vehicles that did the same thing. Anyway, my proposal never went through as no one in PNG ever took it seriously.

I ended up in the streets like so many other Papua New Guineas before me who had gone through college but could not find anything to do. Then, one day while reading a newspaper, I came across an advertisement for people with advanced degrees in science to submit applications for a semester long traineeship at Duke University Marine Lab (DUML). I did not have an advanced degree but one of the requirements was that applicants should have sound knowledge in molecular biology and lab work skills and I knew I could use this to my advantage as I had been an intern at the PNG Institute of Medical Research’s molecular and virology labs and this was the only lab in PNG doing molecular work.
Well, I submitted an application and got the opportunity and came over for the traineeship and went home but thanks to the network I have set up before, I am back now as a research fellow studying the same things that I wanted to work with when I was an undergrad.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

As far as my blogging family tree goes, I guess I will look up to Southern Fried Science as my blog parent and Deep Sea News as the granny. These guys have been awesome at helping me in everything from day one of BomaiCruz. The name ‘Bomai’ hails from the Simbu language of PNG and would translate for someone from the deep jungles, while ‘Cruz’ is from tok pisin, one of the three main languages of Papua New Guinea. ‘Cruz’ actually means to wonder around, hence, BomaiCruz, “someone from the deep jungles wondering around.”

I did not know about blogging, Twitter or Facebook before coming to the USA but am now on Twitter as BomaiBlat and on Facebook too. All this is very exciting for me but keeping up to speed with every one of them can be quite a hassle. I have found that networking can be quite addictive but is also so much fun and is a great way of sharing information and learning about what is going on in the world or just to take part in arguments and discussions. Personally, I have learnt so much more from networking and socializing with other members however, my only word of advice here is that networking and socializing can be so much fun as long as you know how to control its use.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I know this is not going to go down well with other bloggers but I was lucky enough to attend the ScienceOnline conference just a few weeks after I posted the first blog post on my wall. Unfortunately I cannot make comparisons with past science online conferences but from what I saw in this year’s conference, I should say that it was one of the best conferences I have been to in terms of organization and set up. There are two sessions I will remember for a very long time, first was Rebecca Skloot where she was talking about her book and the second and I should say, the one I really liked was the Open Access talk. I think the importance of Open Access as outlined by the speakers is one thing I will take away with me and make sure to pass on to others that I might end up working with.

It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.

Today, I asked Anne Frances Johnson to answer a few questions. Anne is a freelancer and grad student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

When I was a kid, I, like all 8-year-old girls, wanted to be a marine biologist and ride around on dolphins. A couple decades later, I’m still into science and nature, but I don’t actually ride wild animals. I’m a freelance science writer and master’s student in the Medical & Science Journalism program at UNC. I like to think it’s as fun as riding dolphins, but probably better for the environment.

I’m originally from Raleigh, NC, and I’ve recently come full circle back to the Triangle after more than ten years away with stops in New Mexico, New England, New Zealand and Washington, DC (I lived there even though it doesn’t have “new” in its name). I have a B.A. in biology from Smith College, where I spent lots of time cutting open fish stomachs for my thesis on lobster predation (What Eats Lobsters besides People?).

I always liked learning about science, but in college I found actually doing it to be rather gooey and tedious, and decided I probably didn’t have the endurance for it as a career. I found myself gravitating instead toward the edges of science, where it interacts with society. I worked at a marine reserve in New Zealand, patrolled Costa Rican beaches for would-be sea-turtle-egg poachers, and tended persimmons, goats and alpacas on various farms here and abroad. But it wasn’t until my first “real” job–at the National Academy of Sciences–that I discovered science writing. Instantly smitten, I’ve been a ravenous science reader and writer ever since.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

My first science communications piece was an educational booklet on stem cells. Most of the stem cell information available at the time followed either the science community’s party line (embryonic stem cells are more useful than adult stem cells so we should use them) or the conservative/political party line (scientists want to kill babies and we should stop them). Since I was working for a scientific organization, it would have been simple to take the usual tack, but we decided it was really time to go beyond that. I spent a lot of time talking to people ethically opposed to human embryonic stem cell research and tried to craft the booklet so it could reach those folks on their terms, while still being true to the science. Dealing with both the scientific and ethical issues head-on ultimately made it a more useful product for people, and tens of thousands of the booklets found their way into schools and doctors’ offices. It was very rewarding.

After that, I had the pleasure of developing a whole slew of other booklets (and posters and gadgets and websites) on topics including how to plant a pollinator-friendly garden, why microbes are cool and what the new science of “metagenomics” can tell us, and how climate change might affect ecosystems across the U.S. It’s been a constant learning experience.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Last year I decided to go back to school to pick up some additional communications skills I wasn’t sure I could learn on the job. So now I’m a science journalism grad student. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the curriculum is the multimedia work I’m doing. I know “multimedia” is a silly buzzword, but it really is useful to be able to apply whatever combination of media–text, sound, video, graphics, animations–is right for the topic at hand. I’m enjoying learning to wield all those tools and figuring out how to leverage the strengths of each to communicate in an engaging way.

Although teamwork is incredibly powerful, it’s also useful to be able to function as a “one-woman-band,” with a complete suite of skills to produce everything from documentaries to press releases myself. Wherever I end up after I graduate in 2011, I hope I’ll be able to apply all my fun new skills and continue to learn and adapt to the changing communications landscape.

What’s up with going to journalism school? No offense, but isn’t that a dying industry?

I get that a lot. Journalism school is actually alive and well, even in the current climate. The journalism business model is in a period of adjustment that’s leaving a lot of traditional journalists out of work, and that’s too bad. But I think people are hungrier than ever for information, and for the most part they know the difference between bad information and good information. I think there will always be a role for good journalistic work–especially when it comes to science topics.

Career-wise, I’m more interested in communications than traditional journalism, but I think going through this experience of learning to write more like a journalist makes me a stronger communications person. I also just love being in journalism school because I’m surrounded by really creative thinkers from all different backgrounds, which challenges me to go beyond the obvious and try different approaches.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I love that there’s this vast array of genuinely interesting science content online that teachers can use as part of science education. Science education has had a terrible reputation for a long time. The Web gives teachers and parents opportunities to engage children in ways that have never existed before. Kids can interact with the scientific world on their terms and keep following the leads that interest them most. It sure beats those awful textbooks and cheesy videos I remember from childhood.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I have a healthy skepticism about using blogs and social networking in science communications. Organizations pour so much into getting their content out in all these different ways. They’re available and “free,” so why not? And sometimes they’re really effective at amplifying your reach and visibility. But they’re not magical. Sometimes, you’re better off simply producing more or better actual content, and your resources would be better spent focusing on the dissemination avenues that are most effective for your specific target audiences. There’s always a trade-off between quantity and quality, between producing new content and promoting your existing content. You have to hit the right balance, and I think blogs and social networking can be distracting if you don’t keep them in perspective. I try to use ’em when they’re right for the task, and leave ’em when they’re not.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

One of my favorite experiences was getting to hold these really old dead birds they keep in the bowels of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. There were just racks and racks of them. We got to pass them around, and they were so astoundingly light and beautiful. It was fun to connect with nature in the way that taxonomists have for years and years, where you can take note of the tiniest differences among species. I loved that behind-the-scenes tour, and would be thrilled to be able do more of the tours next year.

On blogging, the conference perhaps counterintuitively convinced me that it’s okay not to blog about science. Seeing all those people blogging and tweeting so passionately, I thought, you know, there’s room for all types here. And if daily blogging isn’t my thing, it’s okay. People are blogging about science, and people are writing involved, long-form articles and books about science, and folks will continue to be engaged with science on whatever basis is useful for them–whether it’s monthly, daily or by the second. There are so many possibilities, so many ways for people to talk about science. With all those opportunities, you can really shop around and focus on what you can do best.

Thank you so much for the interview. I hope you will come to the meeting again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Eric Roston, author of The Carbon Age and blogger on Climate Post and Carbon Nation (also on Twitter) to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? What is your (scientific) background?
Many people have high school teachers who inspired them, and who they remember forever. I have one memory of my high school chemistry teacher: Occasionally some friends and I would go to the Jai Alai fronton on a Saturday night (This being Connecticut in the ’80s), and we’d bump into our chemistry teacher and she’d give us betting tips.
“Chemistry” didn’t enter my consciousness again for many years.
Flash forward. After covering a wide range of things at TIME, I began to think, What book could I have read before I started here that could possibly have unified everything I’ve encountered since? This is circa 2003. It became clear that I and a lot of people around me, not just in the energy and climate arena, were talking about carbon all the time and had no idea what it is, in climate, industry, health, pro cycling, etc.
Here’s what it is: The fastest way to learn the most about everything larger than an atom and smaller than a star (no disrespect to the other elements). That was the start of my first book, The Carbon Age. If I had paid attention in high school chemistry, I never would have fallen for it as hard as I did many years later. What Richard Smalley called “the romance of the carbon atom” for me started with an attempt to efficiently answer several big questions at once.
Sometime last month my weekly blog, ClimatePost.net (“Thursdays at three!”), had its first birthday. I started Climate Post as a way for busy non-specialists to keep up with the climate archipelago–science, politics, policy, business, technology–in 1,000 words a week. I like hearing from readers so that I can maximize its usefulness–and your time.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
The Past: I’m basically a journalist. Early on I had formative stints at New York Times and elsewhere. I became so thoroughly disillusioned with the media that I retreated to waiting tables and learning Russian, ending up with an M.A. in Russian history, literature, and linguistics. Eventually, I relapsed and joined Time’s business section, and later, its Washington bureau. (My wife and I met when she worked for Newsweek and I was at Time.)
Present: Against all expectation and reason, earlier this year I started thinking through a novel, a thriller called The Delta Prophecy. I can’t say what it’s about in a word or two without giving away the plot (not guessable).
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The fiction project, or as I’m more comfortable thinking about it, nonnonfiction, emerged in part for practical reasons. These days I can’t cloister myself in the Library of Congress for a couple of years or jet off on short notice to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Rice, or MIT. Personally, I’ve got a family now and they’re my time and passion. There are tradeoffs in life, and I’ve had to step back from reporting and writing things I’m interested in lately because, eh, they’ll be there later but kids are only two once.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
This is almost like asking before, say, 1990, “How does copper wire figure into receiving a telephone signal in your home?
For many members of the rapidly growing Fourth Estate (and similarly, I often suspect, for the clinically insane), blogging, social networks, Google (etc.), Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook are now the main distributors of news media. They have disrupted economies, professions, and 500-year-old vernacular written cultures. The web is reshaping institutions and redistributing skills and demand around the economy.
Nothing is growing anew and nothing is falling to pieces: Everything is growing to pieces.
How do you see journalism changing?
Journalism is not changing. Reporting is not changing. Reporters’ tools are expanding and barriers to publishing have been eliminated–as long as you’re mindful of the Andy Warhol parody line, “In the future we will all be famous for 15 people.”
About a year ago, maybe longer, it seemed various factions in the media and journalism debate were not on the same page. Lost in the shuffle, was discussion of skills and habits of mind useful in reporting, capital R, immutable and eternal. They should be discussed the way we discuss scientific skills and habits of mind.
I sat down to write an essay about the neglect of reporting, but just as soon thought it absurd to write an essay about reporting that didn’t have any reporting. So I reported it out, calling “traditional” journalist friends, former colleagues, strangers. Some talked for a while, some were succinct. Every last person I talked to concluded explicitly or inexplicitly that his or her professional skills lay somewhere in the vicinity of “investigation and storytelling.” (My emphasis.)
One way of describing the change occurring now in journalism is this: Investigation and storytelling have become decoupled. Legacy media institutions were founded and grew up under the principle that investigation and storytelling can’t or shouldn’t be decoupled. Places that understand this are trying to adapt. New associations are emerging to test new models, where “investigation” and “storytelling” are coupled by “or,” not “and.” Now hundreds of people who don’t know each other can collaborate on an investigation. News narrators now needn’t have a network camera in front of them or even get out of their pajamas.
I hope there will always be demand for “investigation and storytelling.” It seems like a reasonable bet. Personally, I like knowing that a person’s or an institution’s reputation, or their paychecks, is on the line for conducting a thorough investigation, presenting findings in an engaging, comprehensive manner, and verifying everything before I see it. It’s a way to both establish trustworthiness and tell a ripping yarn. It might be incomplete, but at least someone’s visibly responsible for it.
There’s a lot of attention, thankfully, to fact-checking lately, because of the success of PolitiFact, a unit of the St. Petersburg Times, and FactCheck.org, of the University of Pennsylvania. It’s worth looking back at one brand of fact-checking, which was invented at Time magazine in the 1920s. Here’s the Introduction to Time’s fact-checking manual, from 1984, by then-chief of research Leah Shanks Gordon: “When an editor asked for examples of how Time research [fact-checking] system had changed in the past ten years, I was hard-pressed to answer. Time research has changed very little since its inception 60 years ago. Its mandate then and now is to make sure the facts are right. What has changed is the technology, and this is a manifestation of the Computer Age. Philosophically, the research system is as sound as the day it was born; technologically, it is a constantly changing function, keeping pace with the latest developments.” Cute that they thought they were living in the computer age.
Then what advice do you have for young “investigators and/or storytellers”?
There are three things I’d recommend people tape to the wall: Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit“; a list of the major logical fallacies; and evolving conclusions from the neuroeconomists and behaviorists about group identity, fact-finding, and opinion-formation.
1) BALONEY: The “Baloney Detection Kit” lays bare the similarities between scientists and journalists. This comes from Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World. If you edit them a little bit, you have a list of suggestions that should not only be pinned to the heads of reporters, but anybody who comes to Washington:
· Verify facts with multiple sources. The more the merrier.
· Absorb all knowledgeable points of view. (Corollary: If a prominent point of view is not knowledgeable, then emphasize that.)
· Don’t assume authorities are correct just because they’re authorities (Corollary: “All administrations lie,” I.F. Stone, et al).
· Develop more than one explanation of what’s going on and test them.
· Don’t overvalue your own insights and pet theories just because you thought of or encountered them.
· Counting counts. Quantify whatever you can.
· Make sure every link works in a chain of logic.
· Remember Occam’s Razor.
· When you’re done reporting and writing, assume everything you’ve done is incorrect until you can document otherwise (ie, check facts).
2) FALLACIES: If you start looking at Twitter, etc. through the lens of the logical fallacies, it’s clear that, if we had to avoid them in tweets, no one would ever have anything to say to each other. I won’t dwell on these except to draw readers’ attention to a decade-old absurdist piece on McSweeneys.net by a John Warner, called, “Possible Winning Solutions to the Board Game ‘Clue’ if the Characters Were Replaced With Right-Leaning Political Pundits, the Weapons Replaced With Logical Fallacies, and the Rooms Replaced With Either Jung’s ‘Psychic Containers’ or Varieties of Soft Cheese.” Wikipedia has a handy long list, although somebody needs to go into it and clean it up.
3) NEUROECONOMICS: Behavioral research has come up with many thought-provoking observations about how people accept or dismiss facts. Cognitive tendencies often skew “fact-finding” activities in one way or another.
Jay Rosen of New York University has suggested that journalists should come with disclaimers of “where I’m coming from.” Personally, I’d prefer a demonstration that they understand these three things and can apply them to themselves and others. Maybe that’s my disclosure.
What is your new media pet peeve?
Occasionally the “me”-driven nature of social media is fundamentally at odds with the outward-looking vector of curiosity and general inquiry that fuels journalism. There are practices and habits of mind central to reporting (and shared with many other professions, notably science) that are at odds with the me-casting zeitgeist of facebook, Twitter, and the blogs. Kurt Cobain was kidding when he said, “Here we are now, entertain us”; not everyone is. There was an article in the New York Times during the 2008 election about college students’ media consumption. Students took part anonymously in a study, and one told the researcher: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” This would go on to become something of a slogan in some parts. We’re making the ’70s “Me decade” look like the ’40s “Greatest Generaion.”
Forget about media and journalism, the “news will find me” ethic struck me as a potentially horrific and arrogant worldview that damns its speaker to manipulation and ignorance. It’s revolutionary that we all receive updates from friends and “friends” through various appliances–I’m certainly among the addicted–but as the outrage over Apple’s control of iPad media indicates, there are incredibly powerful forces who want nothing more than to make sure that news never finds you.
News does not find anyone. You have to go out and gently beat the hell out of the world to give it to you. Along the way, you collect stories that you didn’t set out for. Golden eggs turn out to be rotten, and stones roll over to reveal doubloons. Reporting is frequently what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
There’s always been diversity in reporting. Reporting is hard to define, because everyone brings a different mix of strengths and weaknesses to the interview, in temperament, emotional intelligence, book smarts, comfort around other people, knowledge of when to be tactful, and when not to be. But all reporting basically comes down to the ethos, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I can’t remember a time when the sun didn’t rise or a time I didn’t read ScienceBlogs. I stay close to climate science and evolution, but also sip from the firehose.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you?
Face time with friends, “friends,” and tweeps. It’s also fun to rip it up on topics people feel passionately about, in a friendly, collaborative setting.
Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I’m interested in journalism ethics, and, these days, science-in-fiction…
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Beatrice Lugger, the founding editor of ScienceBlogs Germany, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Hi Bora. Thank you for asking me. I am a German woman from Bavaria. I live and work in Munich, the Oktoberfest city, famous for its beer, lederhosen and dirndl, King Ludwig’s castles, the Alps and the beautiful lakes in the surroundings. I must say I am a real Bavarian although I don’t have a dirndl. But I appreciate living in this megacity that resembles more of a village. I love bicycling, hiking, skiing, swimming or glider flying and can do it all in or very close to Munich. This is no tourist information. This is the truth.
Born in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, I came to Munich to study chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University. There at the University, in the late 1980s, in the time of forest dieback and the Chernobyl disaster, most teachers had still no idea of sustainability. As two fellow students and me managed to focus on ecological chemistry, which we additional studied at the Technical University, one of our teachers at LMU started his lecture with incensed shouting: “We are infiltrated here. For me the green in my soup is enough.” I tried my best to undermine the system but realized I won’t succeed that much in the research system itself. Simultaneously I couldn’t imagine working three years or longer on just one topic for PhD. I am too curious and I love communication, so after my Diploma I started writing. I worked for a small journal called “Politische Ökologie” for some years and then became a freelancer, writing for German newsmagazines and newspapers. To be honest, I did not write that much about ecological topics, but wrote continuously. I appreciate taking looks into different labs, talking and discussing with scientists and not at least trying to transport the information to a broader public.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
With several years of writing my personal ambition changed. I still want to give people the best information. I still like to look into the labs and talk to scientists. But my interest is today focused more and more into the question how to provide first hand information from scientist themselves, how to start a dialogue between both sides – the public and the researchers – and how to overcome prejudices and, really, existing language barriers. One first step into this direction was with the first internet-hype around the year 2000 netdoktor.de, a medical portal, where we did not only offer lots of medical background information, but invited people to chat, email and get in direct contact with experts online. Later I certainly noticed and added one blog after another on my list to follow. Some years later I was asked to start scienceblogs.de in Germany by Hubert Burda Media. This was like Bingo for me. Within some months, the perfect team around me, the bloggers and me were ready to launch the website, which is still very successful. On the Scienceblogs.de platform we also started the first official blog of the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, with which I am actually very engaged.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
These days my children and the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting are taking up most of my passion (and time). First joining the conference in 2008 I have never been at such an impressive and ongoing meeting before as in Lindau. It is not only because there are Nobel laureates you may talk to. It is mainly that you can feel the energy and will from the young researchers to care for the future, to seek solutions, to overcome old rules and more. I hope we can transmit some of this through our current blogs and social media activities. And I very much appreciate the idea of a new dialogue between generations, which is supported by the Lindau Meetings. The young should not stop to listen and ask for the expertise of older generations and the experienced should share their knowledge and give a helping hand. This dialogue is building our future – and has ever before, but we stopped talking to each other.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
If one considers the web as the business card of mankind then I hoped there would be more science and reflections in it. This implicates Open Access to all papers, sharing lectures, videos (also here from generations of scientists), platforms for a profound exchange – for scientists and for the public -… and a critical open dialogue about the upcoming science topics. Blogs do a lot for this. But I think there is a need for worldwide platforms to discuss further steps in a sense of humanity. We could start ethical dialogues from the very beginning. Today for example in ‘synthetic biology’ an ethical debate would be very helpful. Not that we are very close to a human made creature. But we need to discuss about all the opportunities. Is there a need for certain bacteria? Would we allow them to live outside of labs? Is it really in some way like playing God or is this nonsense? …
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
To be honest, I do not have my own blog. I blogged for Scienceblogs.de as long as I have been the editor in charge there. And today I blog for lindau.nature.com. I would love to blog more, but I don’t have the time for it – working and two children. So I became a fan of twitter. As I am working alone in my home office this is one of the possible ways for daily science and online media chats to come to me. It is perfect, if you select the perfect ones to follow.
Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants of your favourite science bloggers at the Conference?
Sure! You! And many others. Durham was the place to be to meet with many and it is hard to pick up just some of them – for example John Timmer from Ars Technica or Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers and many more. It was a real fun to finally meet Simon Frantz, the colleague from nobelprize.org or talk to Scott Huler, who also published his books in Germany.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you?
I especially enjoyed all sessions about Citizen Science such as Science for Citizens, Trixie Tracker or the Open Dinosaur Project. I have not been that aware of that topic before, maybe because in Europe there are not so many activities in this direction. But this fits exactly to my idea of overcoming old rules that separated scientists and science from the public. The more people engage themselves in sciences the easier I think a profound dialogue is possible. And the web is the best tool for citizen sciences – and the dialogue.
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
We had a small session about our social media activities which cover the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meetings, looking forward to find further and better ways of interaction between science generations with the help of the Web. All fellows in this session came up with great ideas and we have now realized some of them on our new central social media site. This was very helpful – and not all ideas are realized yet. So thank you very much for this opportunity and thanks to our attendees for their input!
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Julie Kelsey to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?
My name is Julie Bloss Kelsey. I am a full-time stay-at-home mom and a part-time freelance writer with a background in biology and the environmental sciences. While attending a playgroup when my oldest was a baby, another mom confided to me that she didn’t discuss science with her child because “dads do the science.” I must have looked startled, because she quickly qualified her comment. But that was when it hit me: some people have completed opted out of science. I started my family-friendly science blog, Mama Joules, with the goal of finding ways to demystify the scientific process for non-scientists. I write about things like cricket ears, flying cars, and bowling balls.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I spent eight years working at a state agency evaluating potential hazardous waste sites under the federal Superfund program. I investigated everything from groundwater contamination to lead tailings. One day I took a call that forever changed the way I look at environmental regulation.
A tar-like substance was oozing from the ground at a school for the severely developmentally disabled. After interviewing the neighbors, my co-workers and I learned that the entire area had previously been a dump. I took photographs and carefully documented the condition of the affected playground. I spoke with the health department and compiled information about the potential health risks posed by the contamination. The school subsequently closed – mid-year – and the students were crowded into another school in a different part of the city. One parent told me that her little boy didn’t eat for two weeks after the move. The elderly neighbors living near the school weren’t happy either; several said they were heartsick over losing their “adopted” grandchildren. Here were two disenfranchised groups that had managed to forge an unlikely – and loving – friendship. Did the potential health risks posed by keeping the school open really outweigh the emotional damage caused by closing it? I still wonder.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
As the primary caregiver for my three children – including a newly minted toddler – most of my days are spent yelling, “No, no!” and running through my home at breakneck speed. To keep myself sane, I write when I can. Before my youngest came along, I tried to update my blog three times a week. Now that she’s hit the toddler years, I’m lucky to post once a week. When all of my kids are in school, I’d like to resume working full-time, either as a freelance writer or in the environmental field.
Recently, I discovered the joy of writing poetry on Twitter. I like the bite-sized nature of the writing; it fits my hectic lifestyle. I’ve had limited success publishing my poems online at nifty places like Outshine, Nanoism, microcosms, and 7×20. Eventually, I’d love to publish a book of poetry.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I feel there is a distinct and alarming lack of communication between scientists and the general public. There’s great deal of scientific research out there, but dissemination is a problem. I think of it as a language barrier: scientists tend to use terminology unfamiliar to a casual reader. We need more scientific communicators – bloggers, journalists, media specialists, teachers – to bridge this gap. Too many people are simply opting out of scientific discussions. I think the Web provides a unique opportunity to reach people at whatever level of scientific understanding they possess and help them to re-enter the road to scientific literacy. At some level, we are all scientists.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
When I started Mama Joules, I held the naïve assumption that editors would bang down my door with job offers. Instead, I’ve found that blogging keeps my mind fresh and hones my writing skills so that I can write more effective query letters.
I am astonished at the utility of Twitter. When I first started blogging, I had no idea where I fit in. I’m not a traditional Mommy blogger; my posts aren’t hard-hitting scientific research either. Twitter put me in touch with like-minded folks like Larry Bock of USA Science Fest, Kirk Robbins of Science for All, Alice Enevoldsen of Alice’s Astro Info, Krista Habermehl of Let’s Talk Science, and so many others.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
The first science blog that I remember stumbling across was fellow ScienceOnline2010 blogger Allie Wilkinson’s Oh, for the Love of Science. Allie was writing about fun things, like glow in the dark animals and proof that bees can count. Her blog was the first glimpse I had into the wonderfully rich and diverse world of science blogging.
I am partial to blogs with accessible, fun, family-friendly science posts. In addition to Oh, for the Love of Science, I like Danielle Lee’s Urban Science Adventures©, Messy Fingers, and Growing With Science, among many others.
Darlene Cavalier’s Science Cheerleader and ScienceForCitizens.net inspire me to work harder at outreach. I enjoyed attending her presentations at ScienceOnline2010. And it was fun to meet Mary Ann Spiro, the Baltimore Science News Examiner.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
During a lull in my second session at ScienceOnline2010, I peeked at Twitter. New comments with the #scio10 hashtag were popping up each minute. I eagerly read about a concurrent session which was apparently more exciting and controversial than the one I was attending. I soon realized that every session was under intense dissection in real-time.
Twitter has changed the power structure of today’s conferences. Before, speakers were in charge of their message; they controlled the pace and delivery of their content. Now, a speaker’s message might be broadcast far and wide by the audience before they’ve even finished speaking. Anyone with a Twitter hashtag can participate in a conference and influence its outcome.
Thank you so much for having me, Bora!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Travis Saunders (Twitter), my SciBling from the Obesity Panacea blog to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I am a PhD student in Exercise Physiology at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. My undergrad was in Kinesiology (aka Physical Education) at the University of Calgary, and my Masters was in Exercise Physiology at Queen’s University.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My research focuses on the inter-relationships between obesity, physical activity, and chronic disease risk. For example, I have been involved with studies examining the relationship between different fat depots and health risk (abdominal fat is very bad, but leg fat can actually be protective in some situations), as well as studies examining the benefits of exercise with or without weight-loss (your lipid profile and insulin sensitivity almost always improve in response to exercise, while inflammatory markers seem to improve only in response to weight loss). I’ve just begun my PhD, which is looking at the relationship between sedentary time (e.g. sitting) and health risk. For example, if you run for an hour every morning but then spend the next 7 hours sitting in front of a computer, is your metabolic health going to be better or worse than someone who spends all day on their feet but rarely performs vigorous exercise? No one knows just yet, but it’s a very interesting area of study with important public health implications.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now most of my time is being spent developing my PhD project, as well as (hopefully) getting a few side projects published. I’m fortunate to really enjoy my area of research, as well as the people I work with, so it’s a pretty fun way to spend my days. My short-term goal is to do research that is both interesting to me personally and that has a positive influence on the health of the population. I don’t have any specific long-term goals aside from finishing my PhD, but I know that I want to be involved with both research and science communication in whatever I do next.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
It is absolutely critical that researchers share their findings with the general public, rather than just other colleagues within their research area. I think it’s especially important for those of us performing tax-payer funded research – if the public is paying for our research it only makes sense that we should do everything we can to keep them informed of our results. If the public is better informed they can make better health decisions, but they are also in a better position to understand the value of our research – a clear win-win! For a young researcher like myself, the Web is by far the easiest way to communicate with the public about my area of research.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging has had a very positive impact on my work to date. Writing a blog is almost like doing 2 or 3 Journal Club presentations every week! It has forced me to stay up-to-date on the latest studies in my field of research, and has also helped me to develop my understanding of a number of issues (it’s one thing to skim through a paper, but it’s another thing entirely to write an intelligible blog post about it!) Blogging has also been tremendously helpful in preparing for conferences – responding to comments and questions online is very similar to responding to questions following a presentation (but in a much less stressful environment). As a result, it has made me a much more confident writer and speaker, which has direct benefits in my day-to-day work. And finally, blogging has been a very effective means of spreading the word about my own area of research, which is the whole reason I got into blogging in the first place!
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs (and ScienceBlogs) in SEED magazine. My girlfriend bought me the magazine on a whim and I absolutely loved it, and when I saw an ad for ScienceBlogs I knew it was something that I had to check out. Around the same time my labmate Peter and I stumbled upon the blogs of Drs Arya Sharma and Yoni Freedhoff, two physicians who specialize in the treatment of obesity. That was when we realized that science blogging was something we wanted to get involved with.
For me personally, the coolest part of ScienceOnline2010 was meeting the bloggers that I have been following for the past few years. This includes people like yourself, Ed Yong, Scicurious, the gang from Science Based Medicine, and Dave Munger to name just a few. It was especially nice to meet Dave as he’s not only a phenomenal writer, but also because he has done such great work promoting peer-reviewed research via ResearchBlogging.org.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best part for me was meeting all of the other participants. There were some incredibly talented science-communicators in attendance, and it was a lot of fun to be able to learn from them. Rebecca Skloot’s session on pitching story ideas was especially useful, and gave me a much better understanding of how to frame a story in a way that appeals to journalists, which is an extremely important skill as a researcher.
This year’s conference featured some top-notch science-communicators (Michael Specter, Ed Yong, Rebecca Skloot, Carl Zimmer, etc); I’d love to see next year’s conference bring in a few more top-notch researchers – maybe a Nobel Prize winner or prominent researcher like Brian Greene or Freeman Dyson. This year’s conference helped me learn a lot about science communication from the perspective of journalists and bloggers, but I feel it would be extremely useful to hear what these top researchers could add to the discussion.
Thanks again for all the hard work that you and Anton put into the conference, it was an amazing experience!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Cassie Rodenberg to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a Charleston, SC native that now resides in NYC — a complete Northern convert that carries an appreciation for Southern plantations and shrimp ‘n grits. As a kid I slogged through marshes to erect an osprey perch, played slippery ‘jelly ball’ (jellyfish) hockey on a shrimp boat and floated an ATV across a river, only now realizing how much science I was experiencing. The physics of ATV floating? The surprising number of jelly balls hoisted aboard a boat when hunting for shrimp? The torturous plotting of perch placement in attracting birds of prey? Science is everywhere, why hadn’t I noticed?
I’m shamelessly effervescent about science now, dying to share a cool science factoid or an interesting study, which somehow bubble out despite my best efforts to stem them! I think people care about science more than we think they do; science communicators just need to find out what intrigues them– like ATVs or jellyfish hockey games. Enthusiasm and passion are contagious, too. If we’re truly excited, others will be as well. We all need to find the inner kid that’s fascinated by the world around us, the one that shouts, “oo, cool!” before trying to reach the public.
I studied chemistry during college, finding it the most beautifully simple and elegant of all the sciences. Under an NIH grant, I conducted inorganic chemistry research — single molecule spectroscopy — on the Amyloid-Beta peptide associated with Alzheimer’s, looking at different conditions that stimulate growth of the earliest cytotoxic stages of peptide and thus spur the disease’s formation. And my 11-year-old brother would be horrified if I didn’t mention the coolest part: I worked with a laser in the dark.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Gosh, it certainly is an interesting trajectory…after my lab days I wanted to investigate the public’s perception of science, how people thought about science on a daily basis. Actually, I was so intrigued, I later published psychology research on the subject. If we’re making careers out of reaching people and teaching, we better understand where these people come from and how they think.
And so, I worked at a local science museum, teaching science in big public programs — chemistry demonstrations, reptile shows (yes, I held everything from boas to Madagascar hissing roaches to tarantulas)… even walked around in a toga as the Lady of Pompeii to guide in ancient medicinal practices. Besides learning fascinating things myself (iguanas have a third light-sensing eye on the tops of their heads, my long curly hair could stand on end with enough static electricity power..), I learned quickly how to speak across age barriers, from the three-year-old to her great-grandmother to her bored aunt with a Blackberry.
After, I moved to NYC and took science journalism graduate courses at NYU before becoming an in-house contributor at Popular Mechanics and a writer for the weekly science section of the Charlotte Observer.
Now I’m starting at Discovery as an associate web producer, working mainly with planetgreen.com, a environmental and futuristic tech initiative.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The geek side of me loves production and organization. Though I like writing, I don’t feel married to my byline — the important thing to me is contributing to something meaningful. I hope to do more entrepreneurial work with both science- and non-science-based efforts, hopefully working with idea geniuses to launch new projects. Of course, I’d expect that whatever I delve in will have some scientific element to it, but hybridizing science with other subjects makes it more tangible to readers. We should always be reaching and trying new things… I could never imagine myself without a side project bubbling in the recesses of my mind.
You used to be involved with Scienceline until recently. Can you tell us a little bit more about the project, what was your role there, and what were your experiences while working there? Was it a useful jumping board for your career?
Scienceline is a project of NYU’s graduate science journalism program — all students contributed to running the website and producing content, a mini-newsroom of sorts. It’s a bit like training wheels on a bike: it’s important to get newsroom experience, even working with fellow students as editors, before getting started in the real world of journalism. Though I think it is useful to an extent, especially for giving prospective employers links to clips, I encourage all students to go for internships first and foremost. I’ve always learned most by jumping headlong into a field.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The web provides science communicators a wonderful opportunity for collaboration. Once upon a time, in a small town in South Carolina, I didn’t know any science writers, didn’t know who to go to for advice and inspiration. The web has transformed this, and that struggle isn’t true anymore, as we have genius at our fingertips at just a tweet away. We can craft ideas, bounce them off one another and form relationships. Even further, we can debunk bad science, pass along source recommendations and generate excitement on an issue.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I started out blogging but lost steam fairly quickly, realizing that Twitter was a much better outlet for my exuberance that a blog post because, honestly, I want to talk about science news constantly… but don’t usually have time to blog about it. On Twitter, I can post the gist of my opinion and ask others for theirs in return — much more effective and efficient than waiting around for comments on WordPress. I can feel the hum of my network around my tweets, much more vibrant than a blog. Twitter is inordinately positive in what I do — knowing what the public thinks should be as, if not more so, important to a journalist as writing a piece, and Twitter magnifies the vitality of readers.
Just after ScienceOnline2010, I highlighted an online event in which you played a central role, that hints at how some aspects of the new journalistic ecosystem – scientist-journalist collaboration – may work. What are your thoughts, in light of this event, on the ways the science journalistic ecosystem is changing?
I think scientists and journalists are finally understanding how much they need one another to effectively change the way science news is disseminated. Science journalism should never have been a fragmented system, it should be a constant conversation and relationship between two different sorts of people united by a single goal. Honest and important news comes from general concern and idea generation — the best ideas come from different vantage points. In the future, I imagine scientists and journalists brainstorming and mingling over drinks, public interest forefront. I’ve already mingled on Twitter — the web only enhances the science/journalist cocktail hour.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
It staggered me to think beyond web and print communication and on towards TV, entertainment and citizen journalism projects. It’s invigorating to realize what an effort there is to mesh good science with the public realm and gives me hope that scientific accuracy may not be so far away, that scientists won’t always be portrayed in movies as ‘mad’ and that everyone can do small science projects at home for the benefit of a larger goal.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. Looking forward to meeting you again soon in NYC and I hope to see you here again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Fenella Saunders from The American Scientist to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I was born in England, raised in New York City, did my undergraduate at Duke University in North Carolina, went back to New York for 10 years, then came back to NC five years ago. I have a master’s degree in animal behavior from Hunter College of the City University of New York, where I did my thesis on the interactions of proboscis monkeys in captivity. My undergraduate degree is in computer science with a minor in Japanese, although I chose my major with the concept of going into science journalism.
While I was at college I discussed the education I would need with a number of science journalists, all of whom told me that an education in science, with outside projects to get journalism experience, was the best way to go. (I am from the era just before when it became pretty much standard for science writers to go to an MA program for science journalism.) A computer science major allowed me to study a broad range of sciences and technology, and it also gave me a backup plan in case journalism didn’t work out. At school I wrote for any venue I could get into (and I was lucky that in addition to a regular school paper with a health/medicine section, Duke had both a student-run science and a technology magazine), and in my senior year I wrote a couple of small pieces freelance for Popular Mechanics.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My career started when I landed an internship at Discover Magazine, then got hired on. It was largely a matter of luck and timing: They had a lot of biology people and needed someone with a technology background. I stayed at Discover for about eight years, and ended up also being the online editor toward the end of that time. There were a ton of great moments at that job, but I would have to say my favorite one was when they allowed me to start writing about a different, new robot in each month’s news section. It was a series that lasted 2-3 years, and I never ran out of new robotics research to write about. During that time I freelanced a little, most notably as a co-author for a Time-Life book called “Space 2100.” I left Discover to work on publications for NYU School of Medicine for about two years, which was a very different experience. Probably the best part of that job was learning all about really high-powered MRI machines. For the past five years I’ve been at American Scientist, where I am now a senior editor. It is both fascinating and a challenge working with different scientists each issue, trying to get them to explain their own work for a general audience. I couldn’t even begin to pick a favorite from all of the articles I’ve helped bring to print–it could be anything from Champagne bubbles to snow flakes to honeybee nest relocation.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
American Scientist is published every two months, so we always confront the problem of remaining timely. We want to find more ways to keep in contact with our readers between issues. We recently relaunched our Web site, which allowed us to better keep up with technology in a few ways. We’re now able to embed video with the online versions of articles. We now also post podcasts of our lunch-speaker series. I am excited that I have been chosen as a fellow to attend on of the Knight Digital Media Center’s multimedia workshops, where I’ll learn more about how to edit audio, video and maybe program some Flash animation. I am hoping that after I attend that workshop, I will be better equipped to have us do more multimedia for the magazine online.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The immediacy of the Web still is its biggest advantage in my mind. Something can be posted for all of the world to see within minutes, and if you are looking for information on a specific topic, a quick search will pull up enough reading to last hours. It’s a very democratic platform, as anyone can post on it, but that makes it all the more important to make sure that sources are reputable and verifiable–I am pretty sure that we all rely too much on the truthfulness of Wikipedia these days. I am also hopeful that the Web can make information, about science or anything, more accessible to people who, say, don’t have the luxury of going to college, or find themselves in a position of having to learn about something new that they never thought about doing.
That being said, I am still unsure of how the print vs. online debate is going to shake out. There is something to be said for picking up a whole magazine, not just a specific article you were looking for. It is broadening to be exposed to topics you might not have even realized existed. People are busy, so in some ways it’s faster just to pick up a print copy rather than have to search and dig online. Perhaps platforms such as the iPad will change all this. But I know that, when I have the time, just browsing through publications in the library is the best way for me to get new ideas.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
It’s fairly bizarre for a publication not to use all social-media platforms possible these days. We send out a daily and a weekly conglomeration of science news, and we tweet about these entries daily as well. We also use twitter to talk about what’s in our latest issue, and we tweet about any news that relates to a past story that we have done. We have groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. We don’t have a set blog yet, although we are working on it, but our Computing Science columnist, Brian Hayes, has a regular one at bit-player.org.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Carl Zimmer is a former colleague of mine at Discover magazine, and he was an early entry into the blogosphere, so his was probably the first blog that I followed. I was happy to meet Ed Yong at the conference, and I follow his blog “Not Exactly Rocket Science.” I’ve also been following Rebecca Skloot’s blog about her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I really liked the fact that there were kids at the conference. Kids often are not brought into the dialogue when discussing science, particularly science journalism. Sometimes they are the target audience, but they are rarely part of the process. For a few years we did a mentoring program with a local middle school where we’d have kids come in for a week, but they’d rotate, so I’d get each student for only one day. I challenged them that they would write a whole science news story by the end of the day, and they all looked at me like I was crazy, but they all did it. Children can do amazing things if given the opportunity, and can provide unique insight. I found it particularly enlightening that the young students at ScienceOnline 2010 thought that Twitter was an adult thing–they saw no real use for it in their lives, preferring more interactive platforms such as Facebook.
I can’t say my usual “It was so nice to meet you in person” because I see you often, but certainly thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Jeremy Yoder from University of Idaho and the Denim and Tweed blog to answer a few questions. Jeremy came to ScienceOnline2010 as one of the two winners of the NESCent blogging contest.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Hello, and many thanks for having me! I’m not sure how best to start this, so I’ll just go from the beginning:
I grew up very Mennonite in rural Pennsylvania (no, there were no buggies involved). I’m more-or-less an agnostic now, but my thinking is still strongly influenced by Mennonite values of peacemaking, simplicity, and independent inquiry.
I had my first taste of field biology in my senior year of high school, when one of my science teachers led the class through a forest survey in a woodlot adjacent to the campus. By cataloguing the trees according to their age class and species, we were able to deduce how mature the woodland was, and what it might look like in another hundred years. It opened up this vision of species jostling against each other, accommodating as well as competing to shape the landscape right outside my front door, and it seemed like a pretty cool thing to do for a living.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
From high school on I did my best to arrange to spend time outdoors. I majored in environmental science as an undergraduate, and then spent a year interning with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, working on plant community ecology among other projects. When I started to think about graduate school, I knew I wanted to study coevolution — the ways in which interacting species shape each other’s evolutionary history — and I was lucky enough to connect with Olle Pellmyr, who was looking for a new graduate student to work on his current study of Joshua trees and the moths that pollinate them.
Joshua tree populations are exclusively pollinated by one or the other of two different species of yucca moths. It turns out that trees from populations with different pollinators look pretty different themselves, and we now have good reason to think that the moths’ preferences for their “native” type of Joshua tree determines how often the two tree types can interbreed. A big part of my dissertation work is to use DNA sampling from Joshua trees across the whole Mojave desert to estimate how completely the two types of Joshua tree are isolated, and how much coevolution with the moths is responsible for the differences we see in the two types of tree. Before I started grad school, I’d never seen a North American desert — now I’ve been to just about every place Joshua trees grow, from the south rim of the Grand Canyon to the outer suburbs of Los Angeles and (I kid you not) just outside of Area 51.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
My dissertation is far and away my biggest preoccupation, you won’t be surprised to hear. I’ve just had a couple of projects accepted for publication — a literature review and an analysis that reconstructs some characteristics of the ancestors of yucca moths. I’m (hopefully) nearly done with a mathematical model that compares how different kinds of coevolutionary interactions affect the species involved, and I’m heavily occupied with the Joshua tree DNA analysis right now. My plan is to complete my doctorate by about this time next year, and I’m starting to think about possible postdoctoral work (hint, hint!).
I’m also keeping up with writing on Denim and Tweed for the time being, and I’m thinking about running what will be my second marathon sometime this fall. Hopefully, I’ll find some time to get out and enjoy the wilderness out here in the Pacific Northwest this summer, too, since this might be the last year I spend within a day’s drive of both Olympic and Glacier National Parks.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Most academic biologists spend time teaching in addition to their research, and I really believe that telling the general public about my work is a logical extension of that principle — that being a scientist means communicating what you learn to others, not just accumulating knowledge to satisfy your own curiosity. The Web is a great venue for that, thanks to user-friendly blog hosting services and networks like Research Blogging and the Nature Blog Network that connect interested readers to my site. I now list D&T as a “broader impact” on all my grant applications.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I try to treat Denim and Tweed as an exercise in writing about science for a general audience — so it has that value for me even if no one reads it. In that sense, it’s a little like a one-man journal club, in which I sit down every week and read one paper carefully enough to explain it to someone else in about 700 words.
The blog is pretty heavily linked into my online social network as well — I have a public account on Twitter that I use regularly, and a FriendFeed profile that ties together the blog, my Flickr account, and my Facebook profile. And I interact with family, personal acquaintances, colleagues, and readers of D&T across all those platforms — over my last field trip, I’d post photos from Flickr to the blog, and have folks comment about them on my Facebook wall. It’s not very tidy, but every one of those networks seems to reach a slightly different set of people, so I guess I’m thoroughly enmeshed.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I’ve been reading science blogs since long before it occurred to me to start writing on my own — I don’t remember exactly how I got started, but my first contact was probably when someone sent me a snarky link from Pharyngula. I think I probably didn’t have a sense of the full scope of the science blogosphere before I found Research Blogging, though.
Through RB, I’ve found great sites like The EEB & flow, Conservation Maven, and Open Source Paleontologist, and even occasionally exchanged thoughts in the comments or via back-and-forth posts. Research Blogging is really a fantastic way to get started in writing about science on your own blog, both because it’s easy to add your posts to a feed lots of other science bloggers read and because it helps you find other people writing about the sort of science that interests you.
And then, after I’d been involved in RB for more than a year, I was lucky enough to be able to attend ScienceOnline 2010, and meet in person a number of folks I really only knew as text on the screen — and, yes, add a number of links to my RSS list, including Observations of a Nerd. I think I picked up far more Twitter feeds than blogs at ScienceOnline, though — so much of the conference conversation occurred on Twitter that it was basically unavoidable. And now I probably get more of my online science news via folks I’m following on Twitter than even through the RSS feeds I have bookmarked in Firefox.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I think the biggest benefit I took from ScienceOnline2010 was a better sense of where I fit in the world of online science communication, in my role as a scientist with a blog. I saw some great models of how to draw the public into ongoing scientific work using online tools, and even how to engage the public in the actual science. I also saw some great sessions that addressed interactions among different groups of people involved in science communication — working scientists, educators, and science journalists. It was a really fun weekend all around, and it gave me a lot to think about as I work towards the (still pretty distant!) day when I’m ready to set up my own lab and research program.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Jack from Miss Baker’s Biology class at Staten Island Academy, to answer a few questions. Jack wrote about his experience at ScienceOnline2010 here and wrote a blog post about video/computer games here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you from?
I’m Jack, a freshman student who went to Science Online 2010. I am one of Miss Baker’s students and I’m from NJ. I go to school at Staten Island Academy. I currently play the piano but I am planning to get a drum set to teach myself drums, too. I love making things whether it be some random contraption built out of paper or a game to be put online. I always liked making things since I built stuff with legos when I was in lower school.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I enjoy using photoshop and flash together to make games. Recently, I decided to also write out my own music for the games. I am currently making a few games that have absorbed most of my free time. Between painstakingly creating graphics and filtering through code to thinking of music for the games, my free time is pretty much gone. As for my goals, I always wanted to design and create new devices or develop new software. I really want to go to M.I.T. for college, and I’ve been doing my best in and out of school to try and get there. On a completely different note, I also want to learn Japanese.
What particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I enjoy the amount of freedom that the web gives people, as anyone can access a world-wide database of knowledge for almost any subject. I currently surf the web to find aid in the programming world whenever I have trouble with a script. I also enjoy how the web can be used as a great device for gathering information and doing research. As I move along in developing my programming skills, it is great to talk with fellow programmers to brainstorm possible techniques of getting around difficulties like run time or complex functions.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work and school? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do and want to accomplish?
Using Facebook has helped me immensely as it is quicker and more open than e-mailing, so if I or someone else needs a little help with something, they can simply put it up and one of their friends can help out. I also think it is a great way to spread cool articles and facts. Twitter on the other hand has been abused by hundreds of people. No, I really don’t care that you are “enjoying your microwavable pizza” mrtwittrface. Because of all of the “eating this” or “listening to that” tweets on Twitter, I really can’t get into it.
As Miss Baker, when teaching the Biology class, gives you a lot of creative freedom, how does that affect your own interest in the subject? Do you think you learn better this way? What would you suggest to do differently to make it even better? What are some of your own projects you did for the class?
Of course, I found it easier to learn by writing a blog post and commenting on others. Having the creative freedom allowed me to learn what I wanted to, while also allowing the output of the project to be read and understood by people who aren’t just my classmates. Not only was I able to learn about how video games affect the brain, but I also got to make a game and work on my programming.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I loved the fact that people were able to come together for a few days to talk about how the internet is used in science. It was cool to be one of the 8 kids there looking at everything from a different view than most of the other people there. I can’t believe that while I was presenting, Beth Beck (jokingly) asked, “Would you like a job at NASA?” but I was so focused on not messing up that the question just flew over my head. I didn’t want to ruin my opportunity to present at a conference in front of scientists and journalists and everyone else who was there, too. Because of that moment, I’m now working harder than before on my “occupation” of making flash games, as I realized that I could make a positive impact with my programming knowledge, but I need to keep working on getting better first.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Karyn Hede to answer a few questions:
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I think of myself as a scientist who writes, even though I jumped out of research after graduate school. Most of my formal education is in science. I was biology/chemistry major and then studied genetics in graduate school at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. I should have known I would end up a science communicator though. As an undergraduate, I performed in a “chemistry magic show.” We would go around to elementary and middle schools and get kids involved in the show. It was fantastic to see kids get engaged and to realize that science can be fun. After I committed to making the switch to writing about science and medicine, I studied journalism at UNC-CH. This was well before the medical journalism program existed. I was the oddball. I like to think I helped plant the seed for that program. I’ve spent my whole career telling stories about medicine, science and scientists.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My first professional writing gig was for a local publication called Triangle Business Journal. I talked the editor into letting me write personality profiles of local scientists. My first interview was with George Hitchings, of the [now defunct] Burroughs Wellcome Co., who had just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He was so gracious, and I was so nervous! Many years later, I was working as communications officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a post now occupied by the inestimable Russ Campbell, when Dr. Hitchings passed away. We went over to the old Burroughs Wellcome offices to collect some of his memorabilia for display. They had his personal scrapbook there – he had cut out the article I wrote and put it in his scrapbook. That remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid as a writer.
I was senior science writer at Duke Medical Center for four years. I learned how to put together broadcast-quality video and how to organize and run a news conference. It was a hectic job, and I spent a lot of my time responding to media requests. I discovered I prefer to be on the other side of the equation. I like to be the one asking questions.
Currently, I am a news correspondent for Journal of the National Cancer Institute and for the journal Science’s Careers site. I also write for magazines and science organizations.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?
An undercurrent within my work has always been career development for scientists. When I was a graduate student, you were pretty much on your own as far as exploring career options and developing professional skills. I enjoy teaching and helping support the next generation of scientists. In the last couple of years I have done some consulting work with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center to promote professional science masters programs with the state. We organized a meeting around the issue in 2008. I’ve also been working with Russ Campbell on a series of professional development booklets for scientists. Recently, I started teaching scientific writing for biomedical graduate students at UNC. I taught two courses, one for first-year students and a second course I developed for students who are working their first grant or their dissertation. It’s my way of giving back.
What are your goals?
I am also into gardening and the local food movement. I subscribe to a local CSA at Maple Spring Gardens. A few years ago I organized a session at the National Association of Science Writers meeting to get science writers more interested in covering how our food is produced. Since then, the topic has gotten a lot of coverage, with Michael Pollan’s fantastic books and all the concern over outbreaks of food-borne disease. I’d love to write more about the intersection of science and food production.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I think the wave of the future in science communication is going to be scientists engaging directly with people through their own blogs, videos and websites. Some people (like you!) are naturals and don’t need any help. I know scientists who would like to move more into this arena, but don’t know how to get started. I’d like to work with scientists to help them develop those communication and storytelling skills.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I read blogs and have gotten story ideas from blogs. I don’t have a blog (yet). I like to let ideas percolate for awhile before writing. The thought of having to produce coherent posts every day (or nearly so) is a bit daunting. My Facebook connections are mostly old friends from college and family. I like LinkedIn for work-related networking – it’s a bit more professional and I like having more control over the content.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I lived in Washington state for several years and moved back to North Carolina a couple of years ago. In my absence, I discovered an enthusiastic on-line science blogging community had grown up here. I wasn’t surprised. This has always been a science-rich area – blogging is just the latest incarnation of the local science communications community, but with a much wider reach now. I read your blog, Drugmonkey, Female Science Professor, The Intersection, and Terra Sigillata, among others.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
This was my first time attending ScienceOnline. I was impressed with the sessions and particularly the workshops on Fri. The sessions on visualization in science were valuable, because I was teaching at the time and was able to gather a lot of incredible resources for my students. Meeting so many interesting people who are inventing the future of science communication was great. I’d love to see more of a mashup of working scientists and science communicators shaping the agenda next year.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you can come again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Sonia Stephens to answer a few questions:
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)?
Sure. I’m originally from Minnesota, but moved to Hawaii when I was young. Now I’m living in Florida. So geographically, I’ve been all over the place, but I probably consider Hawaii “home”. I was always interested in science and nature while growing up – while I was in Hawaii, that interest focused a bit on evolution and extinction. Hawaii is one of the evolution hotspots of the world, and now it’s unfortunately one of the extinction hotspots as well. There are many, many biological, political, social, and economic factors that have combined to create this situation in the Hawaiian Islands. Invasive species, climate change, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuels are some specific problems that make it really obvious that “culture” and “nature” are not, and can never be, separate. This idea made a big impression on me in college, so my interest in ecology now is in this interface of the human and natural worlds.
What is your (scientific) background? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
At the University of Hawaii, I studied the ecology of stream algae for my Master’s. After graduating, I worked for the National Park Service on a program to inventory and set up a long-term monitoring plan for Pacific Island park natural resources. I started out working on streams and other freshwater ecosystems, some of which are pretty funky, like anchialine pools. These are brackish systems found in rocky coastal areas in Hawaii, connected to both fresh and salty groundwater through crevices in the basalt substrate. They harbor a unique flora and fauna that can cope with tidal changes in salinity. They’re also culturally hugely important, as the only surface-level freshwater on these incredibly hot, dry coastal lava plains. Unfortunately, they’re also hugely threatened by groundwater pollution, coastal development, and invasive species. So these were some of the key resources that the NPS wanted to protect.
The point at which I started to get interested in science communication was when I began working more in-depth on the actual writing of the monitoring plan, as well as coming up with conceptual models and diagrams to illustrate ecosystems and processes (like anchialine pools). I found it really interesting and challenging to translate some of the complicated ideas into pictures as tools to communicate with the public. A whole different question, though, is how to actually get those explanations and illustrations out to people. Traditionally, the NPS creates park displays, which can only be visited in person, and reports and newsletters, which are now downloadable. But these aren’t necessarily the most far-reaching communication methods.
What I’m interested in doing is exploring how scientific organizations can use online tools to communicate with the public. Right now, I’m a PhD student at the University of Central Florida, in the Texts & Technology program. This is a humanities-based program that emphasizes study of digital media, so it’s pretty interdisciplinary in both methodology and subject matter. What I’d like to do is shed some light on what online tools work best for what purposes, and why some tools work better for some types of communication than others.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Well, as a grad student, classes and teaching are definitely taking up most of my time. Since my program is based in an English department, I’m teaching college composition this academic year as part of my financial support, which has been quite a learning experience for me. This summer and next semester, I’ll be going into taking my candidacy exams and planning research (assuming the exams go well), so that will take up the majority of my time. In my research, I’m planning to use both visual and science communication theories to look at online science communication. I’m definitely interested in doing some empirical research, but those ideas are still taking shape.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I don’t have a blog, but I’ve been slowly dipping my toes into the social network aspect of the Internet. Facebook is a great way to keep track of what people are doing, but it does add to the occasional multitasking frenzy, so I’m not sure whether it’s a net positive yet… My main interest in these tools is more along the lines of asking what they’re good for, in terms of working on public understanding of science. I know a lot of writers like to use blogging as sort of a journaling tool, or a place to play with ideas. I’ve never really enjoyed journaling, but I’m starting to see how it might be useful in preparing for my exams (an idea I got from reading Christina Pikas’s blog), so that might be a good way to get started blogging. Right now, I have a fairly basic website online but I’m hoping to upgrade that soon…
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I do read several of the blogs on the Science Blogs site, but honestly I usually just go to the 24-hour feed and look at what posts seem interesting. I do read a couple of nature blogs pretty regularly- one is by Julie Zickefoose, a nature writer & illustrator. and the other is by a birder, Sharon Stiteler. The rest of the blogs I read are generally politically oriented.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Well, one of the questions that seemed to keep coming up at the meeting was: we have all these online tools to communicate with the public, but what tools work best in what situations? There’s a need for research on how well efforts at online science communication work in what situations. Which, obviously, is where I’m trying to go with my studies. I won’t promise to give a complete answer 🙂 but maybe I’ll be able to shed some light on this question.
I also saw a huge diversity of opinion about what science communication is, what blogging is for, whether we should be striving for science literacy vs. public understanding of science, etc. For these more philosophical questions, the answers really depend on the person doing the communicating. I think listening to the talks at the meeting and participating in some conversations helped me clarify some of those answers for myself and think about where I’d like to focus in my work. Personally, I’m involved in environmental activism, and I think that simply educating people about the science behind environmental issues is a huge step in creating sustainable social change. So my focus is on the public understanding of science, with the underlying goal of making the connections between “culture” and “nature” more obvious. Maybe in a few years, if I keep banging my head on a wall of public miseducation about statistics, for example, I’ll shift my focus to science literacy. But for now, I’ll try to start at least a little smaller!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Antony Williams from ChemSpider to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background? Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Hi Bora…thanks for the invitation to connect! Where do I come from? When people meet me they’ll interpret my mongrel accent in many ways assuming that I am from Australia commonly (especially the Canadians) or from England (which is of course the common term for the United Kingdom over here). Well, I am from the UK but I am Welsh, not English. Earlier in life I was going to be a Welsh teacher but it’s been almost 30 years since I had a conversation in Welsh! I grew up in a small village in Wales of less than a hundred people. From there I went to Liverpool University to do a degree in Chemistry. I found Organic Chemistry very easy but really struggled with Physical Chemistry, especially spectroscopy. I found it very challenging but something in my personality, my friends call it a defect, has me prefer a challenge over something that it easy. I tend to take on those things that challenge me and push me rather than those things that are easy. So, naturally, I focused on physical chemistry, specifically spectroscopy, and in my final year of my degree did a summer project on NMR and got hooked. From there I went to London University to do my PhD looking at the effects of High Pressure on Lubricant Related Systems by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, funded by Shell Oil. I engineered my own High Pressure Vessel made from non-magnetic titanium to stick into a magnet and apply pressures of up to 5kbar to liquids and look at the molecular dynamics under pressure. I was writing software to analyze the data and fit to specific models. Fun times – engineering, chemistry, computing – the type of diversity I like in a project.
From there I went to Ottawa, Canada to work at the National Research Centre (NRC) labs switching from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to Electron Spin Resonance for about 18 months. It was a great place to work and I truly enjoyed the switch to a new type of spectroscopy. However, NMR definitely had more applications so I switched back to NMR and went to the University of Ottawa to run their NMR Facility, again for about 18 months. Lack of funding and the inability to get new equipment in to run even some of the more mundane modern NMR experiments had me look for other opportunities and move South to the United States to work at Kodak in Rochester as their NMR Technology Leader. There I had the responsibility to set the technology vision for NMR and manage a number of their NMR labs. During that period I was focused on the development of walk-up technologies to provide access to modern analytical technologies in the hands of chemists in a “walk-up” environment delivering robotic control, offline data access and processing and an “analytical LIMS” – a laboratory information management system to track samples, structure and spectra through our lab. We build the first web-based LIMS system, called WIMS (Web-based Information Management System) on Netscape Navigator (remember that?) and got a lot of attention and visits from the LIMS vendors. We developed software systems under the simple adage of “The Web is the Way”…how right we were. That work was done in 1996.
From Fortune 500 America I joined a small start-up chemistry software company called Advanced Chemistry Development. I joined as their product manager for NMR and over the next few years grew the product line into the industry leader for NMR prediction, for third party NMR processing and databasing and, one of the best undertakings of my scientific career, a platform for Computer Assisted Structure Elucidation. I had the opportunity to work with some of the best small molecule NMR jocks in the world, an incredible team of developers and scientists at ACD/Labs and then move my skill set outside of NMR. I managed the development of an entire analytical data management system (ADMS) covering Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Mass Spectrometry, Chromatography, Infrared Spectroscopy and a myriad of other analytical techniques. I managed the structure drawing software, ChemSketch, that has had over a million downloads as it is now freeware, and the nomenclature product line for generating systematic names from structures and converting names to structures. The product lines became so successful that we had to bring in a group of other product managers who could focus on the individual product lines. I became their Chief Science Officer with a major focus on business development but always kept my hands in direct product management, marketing and sales. My passion remained the application of software to data handling, manipulation and delivery to scientists and trying to extract as much information as possible from available data.
A few years ago I floated an idea inside ACD/Labs regarding how it might be possible to index chemical compounds within an organization. Not just ones sitting inside a structure database but those represented in documents, reports, papers, publications, patents and represented by chemical names and structure images. It would require the culmination of multiple technologies including entity extraction techniques to find chemical identifiers, algorithms and look-up dictionaries to convert names to structures and software to convert structure images to structures. The intention was to index inside a central database and provide a tool to structurally index the network. We never moved the project forward because there was too much going on.
A couple of years later I was working extreme hours, focused a lot on sales, marketing and business. While it was fun there was a creative part of me not being exercised and I decided to start a hobby project to stress that particular muscle. I’d been watching what was going on with PubChem and a number of other online databases such as DrugBank. Web technologies had come a long way and I implicitly still believed in the “web is the way”. The concept of spidering an organization’s network had expanded to spidering the internet. Admittedly a major undertaking, a lot of the tools were coming together to allow it to happen. A few of my friends and I got together to create a platform for centrally indexing chemistry on the internet with the intention of linking chemical compounds to related resources on the web. And so ChemSpider was born.
Once ChemSpider went online as a structure searchable database of about 10 million chemicals we expanded the database by adding data from various other data sources, added functionality to query the data in various ways and added various services to allow organizations to tap into the resource we were building. Our target shifted over the next couple of years to one of building a structure centric community for chemists and, as we started to assemble and index the public chemistry on the internet it became clear that there was an enormous quality issue in the majority of the public compound databases we wanted to link too. There were so many errors in these databases it was quite shocking. As we assembled our database we were inheriting these errors and it was clear that we would need to curate these data in both robotic and manual ways. We built a curation platform to allow crowdsourced curation of the data so that users of ChemSpider could help us clean up the data. We added a deposition system for users to deposit their own chemistry and we added a series of tools to allow users to annotate the data and add supplementary information. The database today is almost 25 million unique entities assembled from over 300 data sources. We’ve truly built a community of chemists around ChemSpider with thousands of users coming to the site everyday and with a number of these users curating, annotating and adding data on an ongoing basis.
In June of last year the Royal Society of Chemistry acquired ChemSpider and that is where I am now as the Vice President of Strategic Development.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Our focus remains consistent with the original goal of building a central portal for chemists to facilitate traversing the web to find chemistry related data, information and knowledge. At present we remain focused on linking together structure-based data and resources but will eventually expand this out to chemical compounds that cannot be explicitly defined by a chemical structure table…things such as polymers, minerals and mixtures (coal tar, mineral oil, etc.). We busy building curated disambiguation dictionaries and use them as the basis of chemical name (entity) extraction and recognition so that we can perform semantic markup and linking. We continue to expand the breadth and improve the quality of the data on the database with the intention of being able to query and link to every structure-based database that can be accessed via the internet. Chemists have different personae – there are synthetic chemists, analytical scientists, medicinal chemists, chemistry students and teachers to name just a few. While each of these would want to access different types of data for their work and research a Venn Diagram would provide a specific set of query overlaps – let them search by chemical name, chemical structure/substructure and properties. From there they would layer on different expectations about what to do with the result set. The goal is simple…make the internet structure-searchable and provide interfaces and services to allow chemists to query and use the results.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
One specific area of interest I have right now is to encourage crowdsourced collaboration in chemistry. My bias at present is to present an environment whereby members of the chemistry community can give/share/contribute/educate/enable/improve chemistry on the internet. In our terms this means allowing them to add their data to the ChemSpider database, annotate what’s already online, validate and curate out the junk. By applying their skills and contributing they can build their own professional profile in the community and bring benefit to other chemists. We are intending to layer on recognition and rewards systems and allow chemists to form connection networks of collaboration. We ourselves are already immersed into the network of Open Notebook Science providing access to services and data allowing others to perform their research. One of our areas of focus right now is ChemSpider SyntheticPages, an online database of synthetic procedures built for the community by the community. There is so much chemistry, so many chemical reactions that are performed in labs across the world but the synthetic details and associated analytical data never sees light of day and never gets published. It might make it into a thesis but then that will get put on the supervisors shelf or in a library somewhere. Despite the fact that these can be electronically enabled and discoverable the reality is it hardly happens. If we can get just a fraction of the chemistry community to donate one SyntheticPage a week the database will explode. As it’s a free resource chemists have much to benefit. The challenge is to how to encourage a chemist to invest some of their time in writing up their procedure and putting it online. Contributors to date have commented that if its already in electronic format it might add another 15-30 minutes to their day but the result is public exposure of the work, a permanent record of value to other chemists, a public profile for the submitted (including a digital object identifier for the resume!), and an opportunity to engage the community as they can provide feedback and comments. Everyone wins.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work?
I don’t blog as much as I used to simply because I don’t have as much time on my hands. When ChemSpider started I was “dragged” into blogging because of some attacks made on ChemSpider made by very vocal members of the blogosphere. I couldn’t figure out how to defuse some of the misinformation and accusations being made about our efforts with ChemSpider except to become a participant in the blogosphere. I found that blogging became a great way for me to engage the ChemSpider users and get their feedback on ideas for improving the service, to communicate new functionality in the system, to express my views of things going on in the community and to generally release creative expression again through writing.
The ChemSpider blog remains a way to communicate what we’re up to in terms of new developments on ChemSpider and other Cheminformatics projects internal to RSC. It also gives me a voice to comment on what’s going on in chemistry that interests me, what’s happening in the world of Open Science and engaging our users in dialog.
How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Facebook for me, at present, is more of a personal tool in terms of interacting with my friends and family in the UK and around the world. I use Twitter quite regularly (as @ChemSpiderman) and certainly while I am sitting in conferences and seminars. I have found Twitter surprisingly useful, more than I had ever imagined when it first showed up on the scene. My interactions via Friendfeed are certainly useful and I stay connected to certain groups of people on there and stay connected and informed. While each of these takes time it is definitely a net positive, though I would clarify, not a necessity for what I do. I am definitely an advocate for LinkedIn and find the networking aspects of that platform in particular very enabling.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs when I was dragged into the blogosphere by some particularly negative commentaries that were being made about ChemSpider. Lots of judgments, the majority of them not fact-based, were made about what we were trying to achieve with ChemSpider. As they say however, “no press is bad press” and once the fire was lit I entered the blogosphere to respond to the accusations. Without doing so I feel that our reputation would have been very negatively tarnished. It is one of the downsides of the blogosphere unfortunately…people get to say whatever they want, whatever they perceive and, in certain cases have no facts or data to back up their claims. That is when things get very interesting and engaging though!
My Google Reader follows a number of bloggers from my domain. I have a particular appreciation for the insights of Derek Lowe on his “In the Pipeline” blog. I follow Cameron Neylon, Jean-Claude Bradley, Egon Willighagen, Milkshake’s “Org Prep Daily“, Paul Docherty’s “Totally Synthetic” and many others of a similar nature. I had to slim down what was feeding the reader recently as following too many people was becoming overly distracting. I didn’t start following any particular blogs after the ScienceOnline conference but I do watch a lot more people via Twitter now and, when they tweet a post of interest, I navigate over to their blog. Twitter has become another way to link me into blogposts of interest without me overpopulating my reader.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
ScienceOnline was fun. I attend a lot of conferences in a year but the energy at ScienceOnline is simply contagious. The level of engagement and contribution far outweighs that I have experienced at any other conference other than the two SciFoo meetings I have attended. Participants at these types of meeting are there to do more than listen. They want to speak…they want to engage and they want to share their opinions. At many conferences there are blocks of time when I am not in sessions. At ScienceOnline there were too many sessions I wanted to sit in on and couldn’t. A much better situation! I walked out of the meeting with new connections, new collaborations and new possibilities. Definitely worth attending.
My one embarrassing moment was when I stood up to do the Lightning (Ignite) Talk at the dinner and hadn’t read the rules of engagement as it were. A pure oversight on my part regarding the flow of the Ignite Talk it actually worked for some strange and unknown reason. Keep the Ignite Talk format next year at the dinner…they were great fun.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Emily Fisher from Oceana to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I grew up in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, and moved to Washington, DC about three years ago. I’m a writer and editor, not a scientist, but I’ve become more and more interested in science the last few years, which has surprised me. In school, science was always my least favorite subject and the one I did the worst in. The worst grade I ever got in high school was a C in physics, and that was after crying regularly during office hours. As an English major in college, I only took one science class: astronomy, and that was so I could go to UNC’s great planetarium.
I’ve always loved reading, writing and spending time in nature, so I’ve come around to science as an environmentalist. I want to spend my life helping protect the environment through writing and editing, so I’ve come to appreciate that I need to know the science behind what’s happening to the planet – and I’m increasingly curious about it. Scientific thinking doesn’t come easy to me, but maybe that’s also part of its appeal.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My first job out of college was as an assistant editor for a small non-profit publisher that focused mostly on neuroscience. I learned a lot about the brain, though ironically I can’t remember most of it now…
After that I worked for a news aggregator web start-up called Brijit.com. We took long-form journalism (articles from the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, etc.) and published 100-word abstracts of the articles. It was like a thinking person’s Digg. It was a tremendously fun atmosphere — there were just a few of us editors, sitting around one big table in a one-room apartment in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of DC. We were churning out around 100 abstracts a day — we had it down to a science, really — and having a great time. We had a really cool thing going, but unfortunately the money ran out.

For the past two years I’ve worked for the ocean conservation organization Oceana as the web editor. I’ve learned so much about the threats facing the ocean, from ocean acidification to shark finning to bottom trawling, and I’ve become an ocean advocate myself.
Twice I’ve gone to the coast of North Carolina (Bald Head Island) to write about sea turtles for our blog and magazine — once I documented sea turtles hatching and once I wrote about nesting mothers. Both were incredible experiences.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
At Oceana, I’m focused on making our website and blog the most readable and engaging place for ocean conservation information. I would love to make us the number one place online for the oceans.
More specifically, right now in light of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, we are trying to get 500,000 people to sign our petition to Obama and Congress stop new offshore drilling. So far we’ve gotten nearly 33,000 signatures.
I’m also passionate about sustainable food, so in my free time I spend a lot of time at the farmers’ market and trying out new recipes with friends. I also do a lot of yoga and am attempting to learn how to play the guitar.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging is a big part of what I do on a daily basis. I aim to post one blog a day on Oceana’s blog, The Beacon, and sometimes I do more. In the last few weeks, for example, I’ve been posting two, three, four posts a day because of the oil spill. I think a lot of folks at Oceana have recognized what an asset the blog is at a time like this, when we want to react swiftly to the crisis and get our voice out there.
I started our Twitter account last year, and a friend and colleague of mine has pretty much taken it over along with Facebook. She’s doing a great job getting people engaged in our work.
I think blogging and social media are a crucial part of our communications work at Oceana — it’s our primary method of interacting directly with our activist base, or Wavemakers, and hearing their ideas, concerns and questions. Our CEO, Andy Sharpless, is even tweeting now, at @Oceana_Andy.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I really enjoyed finally meeting people that I had online relationships with but never met in person, like Miriam Goldstein and the guys from Deep Sea News and Southern Fried Science. I also met some great new people, like the web editor from the New England Aquarium.
At the session about the future of science journalism, I realized that the line between blogger and journalist is truly blurred now. Similarly, at the session about social media from the Pacific Garbage Patch, I was impressed to see how science can be documented using social media tools like blogging and Twitter, even from the middle of the ocean. It was really striking to hear that the journalist’s New York Times story about the garbage patch was less effective and reached fewer people than her personal blog did.
I also really enjoyed the “blog to book” session. It’s my dream to write a book one day, and while a book project itself seems overwhelming, blogging doesn’t. It made a book seem like an achievable goal — some day.
It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Amy Freitag from Southern Fried Science to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Well, first, the basics: I’m a PhD student at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC. My research looks at different types of knowledge relating to water quality out here on the coast and how they do and don’t mesh to form a cohesive, scientifically-based policy to protect our estuarine resources for future generations. My scientific philosophy is a bit different than your standard empiricist, a discussion I and my co-bloggers have had in great detail and in print on the blog. Since humans and their behavior and decisions are a large part of my research, I tend to have a difficult time separating research from activism and have to pay constant attention to my role in my research community, as it extends far beyond just observation. This creates both opportunities and responsibilities.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m interdisciplinary at heart. I never could decide if I’d rather be out talking to people or in the field counting critters. But really, the unifying factor is the observational, exploratory nature of the research, something I’d like to continue. Whether doing interviews or planting data loggers in the intertidal, it’s a field experience – a type of lifestyle where surprises are the norm. You set out with a mission to study one thing and your dissertation ends up being on something completely different that emerged from experiences during the research process. That’s what keeps me ticking – those surprises keep life interesting.
One of my favorite research projects arose from a “study abroad” experience in Alaska Native territory. The motivation initially was to get to Alaska and pay for my adventures by doing fieldwork. A forestry professor hired me to help with a prescribed burn about 45 minutes outside of Fairbanks that he and “the hotshots” from the forest service were planning. My role was to hike out every day for a few weeks and basically map out what the forest looked like pre-burn – size and types of trees, animal paths, type of understory, topography, etc. Fairly basic forestry science, which had been part of my academic history as I had spent a summer as an intern in a sugar maple plantation. However, the summer was a wet one and after I was done with all those measurements, the burn was declared postponed until the following summer. I was offered the opportunity to be a roving field hand and help with any of the projects going on at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) that needed help.
After project-hopping for a few weeks, I was invited to come along to Venetie, a small village of roughly 200 people at the foothills of the Brooks Range in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge that was concerned about their subsistence resources and had asked for research help from an anthropologist at UAF. I flew into town and got the tour, through a dusty general store and around the village, where there were no cars and the town activity for the day was to build a house for a recently married couple who had decided to move back to their hometown to raise their coming child.
The next day we met with the council of elders to discuss research needs and clarify the arrangement of intellectual property between UAF and the tribe. That evening, we went with one of the elders on a moose hunt, modern style – on the back of an ATV with a large rifle that could both spot and shoot across Big Lake. We didn’t see any moose that night, but did take home a duck for dinner. From a couple days’ experience, I became aware of the need for socially relevant research and collaboration with the residents in the area so carefully studied for the ecological literature. The project that resulted for me was a GIS analysis of changing subsistence resources (moose, caribou, berries, waterfowl, timber for wood stoves) under various models of increased fire due to climate change. From that, the tribe could predict which villages were the most vulnerable to resource shortages and plan for either moving them or subsidizing their needs from other villages.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
As for a lot of PhD students, most of my time goes towards my research, which is luckily also a passion of mine. I’m very much in planning stages for my life for the next three years, which is both exciting and a little bit nerve-wrecking as well. Part of that is making the friends and contacts I will need in order to get good interviews over the next few years, gaining rapport within the community. That’s often just a fun social science excuse to get out and do fun things 🙂 And hopefully, after my time here is done, I will have “an ethnography of water quality”.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Science communication is crucial to both my research and commitment to broader impacts. It’s critical for transfer of knowledge and the collaboration that is necessary for effective policy. Beyond my particular interests, though, I’m often baffled by how many scientific articles are difficult to penetrate even for people who know the lingo. My undergrad advisor once said that if you can’t explain what you do to a fourth grader, taking into account their attention span, you aren’t doing good science. I’ve taken that as a mission in my life and the use of the Web is a great way to reach all the fourth graders out there.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I find blogging a good way for me to practice and refine my writing and keep my brain grounded in the real world in terms of the jargon I use. It’s a great way to extricate myself from the ivory tower. In addition, I find it super useful to have a blog up and running and respected when the time comes to write broader impacts statements. Through the summer, I will be blogging about my first time on a research cruise on the open ocean and potentially a trip to the Gulf of Mexico. In these cases, it’s both positive and necessary to blog and get immediate feedback. I credit our commenters and my Twitter friends for making me a better scientist.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs through friends, first the Cornell Mushroom Blog and then the one I now write for, Southern Fried Science. To be honest, I was more familiar with the political blogs, especially of the DC area where I grew up. It was a welcome find to discover science blogs and I am still surprised how welcoming the community has been. Like many before me have said, ScienceOnline is a great forum to put a face to a name on a blog and a personality behind the writing. It’s critical to keeping the community going and creating traditions and camaraderie between blogs (from singing sea shanties with the other ocean bloggers to planning Carnival of the Blue and swapping blog stories). I’ve met a number of awesome people just from one year attending ScienceOnline that are all easy to keep in touch with because we’re active over Twitter (like Jeff Ives of the New England Aquarium and Miriam Goldstein of Deep Sea News). These connections will definitely help me both professionally and personally in the future.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The tweeting of all five parallel sessions by practically everyone in them was a change of conference culture for me, but one I would like to see occur elsewhere. It brought unity to the conference and made one fluid conversation happen as people drifted from session to session. I can’t wait to go back next year!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Jason Hoyt from Mendeley to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)?
I am from the San Francisco Bay Area, but split my time between San Francisco and London for work. Such a commute obviously has advantages and disadvantages. Sticking with the positives, I love how this provides two wonderfully contrasting perspectives on science and technology when I speak to people on either side of the pond. You also quickly see what people have in common, regardless of location, with where they want to see science to go.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I did my doctoral research in genetics, and more specifically, gene and stem cell therapy using non-viral vectors. This was done in what might be considered the best department in the world for doing such research, the Stanford University Genetics Department…though I might be a little bias. Despite loving the bench, even before I entered graduate school I knew that I wanted to be more on the entrepreneurial side of science. I think I am accomplishing that with what I am doing now, building software for researchers at Mendeley.
Sure, telling people I work on adult stem cells to cure genetics diseases of the blood sounds a whole lot sexier than software guy, but I think the impact I am making is bigger than I could be achieving at this point in my career if I had stuck to the bench. If I can create a tool that 10 scientists use to advance their research, then that is 10x the impact I would make as a pure scientist. That is obviously a simplistic view, but that attitude is essential to have if you decide upon a non-traditional science career.
And for those exploring alternative careers, my advice would be to let it find you. I started building software tools as a graduate student in my “spare time” to help my research. I was amazed to find how passionate I was about it and that other people were interested in using those tools. I would have failed if I had taken the other approach of asking, “what tool could I build to launch a career?” Instead, look for what is missing in your life that you would like to have. That passion will lead you.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
We recently announced an Open API platform on Mendeley. Beyond the personal excitement about it, this is huge for science and more generally, academia. We definitely are not the first to have an API about academic literature or the metadata surrounding it, but I think we are the first to make that data easily accessible to everyone.
The Internet came about through a need for academics to remotely collaborate. Yet, somehow Silicon Valley technologists are the ones who really took advantage of it. Academia left it behind once out of the R&D stage. Why not use the creativity and development power of Silicon Valley to improve science and get academia back into the game? That’s what these new APIs do; they finally link the backbone originally built for academics to people who can really sex it up.
As we move forward, I want to make academic data more open, more translatable, so that either academics or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can build and create. Everyone will benefit from that.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I have TweetDeck open all of the time, so that I can keep on top of science and tech news, as well as opinions. I have a million RSS feeds that I follow in Google Reader. Staying on top of the news and opinions of the crowd is essential for what I am doing for work and personally. I’ll be honest though, it is often information overload, even when it is a high signal to noise ratio. That said, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to look beyond just the on goings of science. Looking cross-sector into the tech industry is really inspiring when you are thinking about how to improve science.
As for blogging, it isn’t essential to my work, but it is both gratifying and almost feels like a moral obligation as a trained scientist to be a communicator for science. I realize how that sounds a little too much like “mad man claiming to receive revelation.”
Going off on an alternative science career means I have a perspective that some people may want or even need to hear about, whether they agree or disagree with my opinions. For example, there was tremendous feedback both on the blog and around the social networks over an article I wrote asking if there are too many PhDs.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Really disappointing that when I was in grad school, science blogs were never a part of the curriculum. It was an outsider activity back then and there were very few regular bloggers. That’s all changing. It’s exciting to see professors really getting into things. One of my recent favorites is Vincent Racaniello out of Columbia. He does “This week in virology” podcasting and blogging, and also makes his blog a part of the courses that he teaches.
Another great one is Academic Productivity blog. How awesome that would have been to read while I was a student. It’s still a fantastic read as a graduate.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year?
ScienceOnline2010 had a great blend of conference with “unconference” or the so-called barcamp style. There was enough structure so that open discussions didn’t end up a giant tangent that wasted your time, but also informal enough to prevent a repeat of topics you’ve heard a million times. For instance, every science conference these days has some section on social networking. Great! You’re telling me what I’ve known for years. ScienceOnline, since it’s all about, well science online, goes deeper. I hope to see more technologists invited out to future events. The style and content suits them well and would really complement the current audience.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Tom Linden from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
My passion always has revolved around journalism. When as a scrawny 13-year-old, I failed to make the starting nine on my JV high school baseball team, I was devastated. Rather than wait for my body to catch up to my aspirations, I jumped into journalism, eventually becoming my high school newspaper’s sports editor and editor-in-chief. I loved words and stories and so continued on my writing path through college where I was a columnist and editor for the Yale Daily News. As a senior at Yale, I covered for the Los Angeles Times the pretrial hearings of several Black Panthers accused of murder in New Haven, Conn. After graduation I worked on the city desk of the Times.
After taking a year off to do research for a book (that never materialized), I suffered a case of writer’s block and decided to pursue a career that would give me tools to travel around the world and practice a new craft… medicine. Within weeks of registering for med school, I realized that the journalism bug never left me. I completed med school and a residency in adult and child psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation, then in Topeka, Kans., and started a private practice in which I subsidized what I would call my “journalism addiction.” I worked at a small local television station in the northern Sacramento Valley where I became the health reporter and eventually the 5 o’clock news anchor. In 1989 CNBC hired me to join their start-up cable news venture as both a medical and environmental reporter and a financial news anchor. For the next eight years I worked for a variety of television stations and networks, including the Financial News Network, KRON-TV (San Francisco), Fox-11 (Los Angeles) and Lifetime Medical Television. I also started anchoring Journal Watch Audio, produced by the Audio-Digest Foundation and the Massachusetts Medical Society. In 1995 I co-authored one of the first books on the medical Internet, Dr. Tom Linden’s Guide to Online Medicine. In 1997 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hired me to start a medical journalism program in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
As part of our program in medical and science journalism, my students and I have produced a couple documentaries with an environmental focus and more than 25 feature stories for North Carolina Public Television. I also just authored a book, The New York Times Reader: Health and Medicine, published by CQ Press. The book is both a compendium of great stories from The Times and a how-to manual for aspiring medical and health writers.
For the future I’m interested in producing a sequel to our Environmental Heroes documentary and continuing to help educate medical and science journalists.
Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?
I grow most of my own vegetables and fruit from May through November. I’ve just planted seven fig trees that I cloned over the winter and have more starter tomatoes, peppers and eggplants than I know what to do with. I voraciously follow the news and love walking in the forests of North Carolina. My family loves to travel, but travel and maintaining a major garden (small farm) don’t always mesh. I also love to hear good music. In North Carolina there’s lots of it.
Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)?
I was born in California and have lived on both coasts and on the Plains (Kansas) which is very oceanic if you live in the countryside. If I had unlimited resources, I would live by the sea. Philosophically, I am a skeptic and question just about everything.
What is your (scientific) background?
As I said above, I went to medical school and took the usual courses. Science used to intimidate me, but does no longer. I’ve learned more about medicine by reporting on it, than I did in the hours and days that I spent studying it.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?
Writing The New York Times Reader: Health & Medicine took most of my free time over the last year and a half. Now that the book has been published, I’m looking for a new project. I keep getting drawn to environmental issues since climate change and the destruction of the earth’s natural habitats loom as the biggest issues facing humankind. The challenge is to find stories that inspire action and not just induce fear.
What are your goals?
I’d like to see young people (i.e., everyone under the age of 30) do a better job of taking care of the planet than their parents and grandparents. I’d like to help them do that in any way that I can.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Clearly the Web is the pipeline through which knowledge will travel over the next couple decades. I’m looking for ways to reach non-scientists with information that will both engage and inform them. As a television journalist, I see video as probably the most powerful tool to reach masses of people. The challenge is to how tell video stories in ways that both entertain and educate.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I have a blog, “Dr. Tom Linden’s Health Blog“, but am still trying to figure out what my blog voice is. I’ve taken a little hiatus in updating the blog during the course of writing my latest book, but hope to post more often in the days ahead. In tweeting a lot at a recent conference of the <a href="” target=”_blank” title=””>Assn. of Health Care Journalists, I got an appreciation for how much fun tweeting is.
Online activity is both a joy and a burden. I love staying connected with what’s happening around the world, but find it hard to control the beast. If you’re a journalist, you need to be comfortable with the entire toolkit.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
David Kroll (Abel Pharmboy) and Anton Zuiker were my first science blogging mentors. I’m a fickle blogging reader and will follow a link at anything that piques my interest.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I love the networking that goes on at ScienceOnline. After each session I pore over the Web reading about the people I’ve just met. I liked Ivan Oransky’s suggestion in a previous Q&A about having full disclosure for all speakers and panel members at future conferences. Also, it would be nice to get back to the un-conference mode of the first few ScienceOnline meetings. Keep up the great work, Bora, David, Anton and everyone else who brings us this ScienceOnline gift every year.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you soon.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Tyler Dukes to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a journalist working as a Web producer for News 14 Carolina in Raleigh, N.C., and I do freelance science writing on the side. I grew up mostly in eastern North Carolina, not too far from the Outer Banks, and I’ve lived in the South my entire life. I wanted to be an engineer when I left for N.C. State University. But that changed after 2-and-a-half years of class, a rapidly declining GPA and an increased leadership role at the student newspaper.
Looking back now, I think I bristled at specialization. I loved understanding the basics of complicated science and technical topics, but when I dove deeper I thought about all the other neat science I was missing out on. That curiosity is a skill in journalism, especially science journalism; but in engineering, it’s a distraction.
In short, I’m a southern science storyteller, which means I wax poetic about the chemistry of barbecue while I’m out cooking a pig for a football tailgate.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
When I came back for a victory lap (read: fifth year) at N.C. State after four years and a stint as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, I got the gig as Science & Tech editor there. That meant a whole year of chasing stories about campus research and science issues affecting the community. I covered the phenomenon of disappearing bees, interviewed the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and sprinkled in some in-depth general news stories along the way.

In the months while I languished between graduation and full-time employment, I discovered blogging and podcasting. I even created a short-lived series on beer in the Triangle (another one of my passions). In late 2009, I revamped my personal blog, Write -30-, which is all about the changes in the journalism industry.
I’ve also spent the last two years at News 14 trying to figure out how to use social media to make the journalism at the station better. I’ve learned a lot, but as a side effect I’ve met a crazy amount of awesome people. It’s actually how I first learned about ScienceOnline.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now, I’m doing more freelance science writing in my free time, which is even more fun than I figured it would be. I’m also periodically blogging about whatever journalism topics that happen to interest me at any given moment.
At some distant point in my career, I’d love to be a staff writer for a science and technology magazine. But the future of journalism is really hard to foresee right now, so I’m a bit unsure about what jobs will exist in 10 years and which ones I’ll be qualified for. Regardless of the medium, I’ll be happy enough to continue my vain attempts to satisfy my insatiable curiousity.
I’m also planning my wedding in June, which is way less fun than I figured it would be. But my soon-to-be wife is awesome, so it’s definitely worth it.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I love how science communication requires you to think like both a scientist and a writer (at least if you do it right). I spent a long time in college rewiring my brain to understand Java, electron physics and differential equations, so I feel like I’d be doing my student loans a disservice if I didn’t put that partially rewired brain to good use.
When it comes to the Web, I love the chaos it creates. News organizations, for the most part, have taken their credibility for granted. Reporters and editors assume, right or wrong, that it’s the newspaper masthead and the history behind it that gives them that credibility. They’ve seldom been challenged or forced to prove why anyone should trust them, and the result is a rapid decline in their audience’s confidence.
Bloggers, on the other hand, are forced to prove to their readers why they should be trusted. It’s not enough to have a Web site. They have to build their audience and their credibility over time, and the result of that process tends to be a more quality product in a lot of ways.
This is a really valuable exercise for science journalists and reporters in general, and we’re seeing it reflected even with more traditional reporters. That’s why there’s more and more emphasis on reporters working to build their “personal brand,” independent of a newspaper or television station.
The Web has made credibility more personal, and that’s a good thing for everybody.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
When I first started at News 14 Carolina, our social media presence was nonexistant. We had a few blogs here and there, but there was no unifying strategy or plan to embrace these technologies. We started small, with a few Twitter accounts and a Facebook Page where we really worked to engage our audience in actual conversation. What we really wanted to do is show the news directors and our general manager that these were valuable uses of our time that needed to be integrated into the station’s workflow. The case we made, with both research on how people use social media and actual data from our own social media brand, was that we needed to bring our content where people are on the Web.
After about a year, the impact was really clear. Facebook grew from one of our top-20 referring sites to our No. 1 referring site. That’s higher than Yahoo and Google. Now that we’ve made our case, a lot more of the newsroom has started to come on board. More people are signing up for Twitter and creating fan pages on Facebook with the intention of connecting with viewers. They don’t see it as extra work, but as a way to make their work more valuable. That’s very rewarding to me.
Personally, I’ve found my blog, Twitter and Facebook to be invaluable tools for reaching out and connecting with more people in journalism and science. These are people I might never come into contact face to face, and I’ve really been amazed by how accessible this technology makes everyone.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Most of the science blogs I read before ScienceOnline were the offshoots of more traditional news publications. Short Sharp Science on New Scientist and Wired Science were some of my favorites. I’ve also followed technology blogs, like TechCrunch, Engadget and Gizmodo, for a while.
Many of my favorite blogs now I discovered after meeting the bloggers at ScienceOnline. Your own Blog Around the Clock, Deep Sea News, Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science and Ben Young Landis’ blog are all in my Google Reader now.
Oddly enough, I came across Deep Sea News back in June 2009 when I was researching a story I did on the Cameron Village sewer monster. They had a story (and identification) on the creepy lifeform before any traditional media outlets. Now I’m a pretty frequent reader.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I’m a big fan of journalism conferences. There’s nothing like getting out of the newsroom for a few days to rub elbows with some great reporters and editors and draw inspiration from their advice and work.
But the thing I loved about ScienceOnline was that it pulled together three very different groups — scientists, science communicators and science journalists — for some very frank (and often contentious) conversations about a shared goal: how to use the Web to increase the public’s understanding of science. Through Twitter, blogs and Facebook, those conversations started before the conference even began. By the time we all showed up, people were familiar with each other’s work, which helped the discussion flow more freely. That conversation continues today, and I can honestly say I got more out of ScienceOnline than any conference I’ve ever attended.
It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Scott Huler to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
My scientific background is all writing; that is, I’m a writer who has always loved science and scientists, but I never practiced advanced science. I’ve been all about getting the word out from the start. All through school I took every science course I could — geology, astronomy, biology, calculus, physics, chemistry — because I loved the power of science and scientific thinking and understanding, but I never doubted I’d major, as I did, in literature. Writing was what I wanted to do.
Now I live in Raleigh, NC, surrounded by interesting science and interesting scientists and never lack for subject matter. I’ve written about — and write about — lots of things, not just science, but even that generalism is a sort of scientific philosophy. The natural philosophers of the 17th and 18th century were in many ways the first true scientists, but they didn’t think of themselves as such — they thought of themselves as people who wanted to know the whys and hows of their world, and they didn’t limit themselves to certain processes or issues. In my work, and my life, I aspire to be like them.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’ve always wanted to write, so out of college I’ve just sort of made my way towards writing work of one sort or another. That’s let to electronic media as well, doing radio work for NPR and its affiliates and video work on websites and other places. Since I’ve done every newsroom job from copy editor to managing editor and told stories in books, on the radio, and on video, I like to think I can let the story come to me and tell me how it wants to express itself: sound? images? words on paper? When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. I like to try to be more like a tool belt.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate with projects. I’ll list a few projects during which for at least at one moment I thought, “If this is as good as it gets, if this is the best assignment I ever have, I cannot complain.”
— in 1995 as a member of the staff of the News & Observer in Raleigh I joined with staffers of four other papers up and down the East Coast and joined with them to complete a sort of relay through hike of the Appalachian Trail. The N&O was an early adopter of the web, so there was a lot of traffic on the website for that (examples: Going The Distance On A Smokies Trail and Our adventure ends)
— in 1997-98 I spent much of my free time hanging around the garage following a top-level NASCAR race team, trying to understand how the physics lesson of making a car go fast. That too led to a book, but here’s a cool story I did for the Times about what happens when it all goes wrong.
— in 2002-3 I finished two decades of the most desultory research by spending a year on a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan getting to the bottom of the Beaufort Scale of wind force. No, I am not kidding, the Beaufort Scale of wind force. It’s a smashing, poetic, highly observational, descriptive scale of the wind. Long story, but it turned into a book, and the weeks I spent sketching the coast of Montevideo, Uruguay, from the bridge of a hydrofoil or hoisting sail on the barque “Europa” were lifetime reporting highlights.
— in 2004 I skipped out on much of the pregnancy of my first child to spend months tracing the journey of Odysseus from Troy, in Turkey, to Ithaca in Greece, decidedly by the scenic route. I hope the book was good, but I was just glad to be out there.
— in 2008-9 I spent most of my time going to water plants and sewage plants, scrabbling around in storm drains and substations, trying to make sense of all the infrastructure that serves my house and everybody’s house. It was like having my entire work life be the best sixth-grade field trip of your life, for two years. The book is just out.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Amazingly, for the first time ever, I haven’t just walked away from the topic I’ve finished a book on. There seems to be so much more to talk about in the systems I’ve spent the last years learning about that I’m not quite ready to be done. To that end I’ve spent the last month doing a video project for the city of Raleigh about its brand-new water plant opening May 12 and hoping to do more of the same. That said, I am and will remain a generalist — you never know what the next project will be.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’m fascinated by the history of science in our daily lives, whether it’s finding out through the Beaufort Scale that the wind was oil back in the day, powering our entire commerce structure, or that Herodotus and Pliny pointed to aqueducts and sewers as the glory of Greece and Rome, not to the Parthenon Pantheon, the Agora or the Forum. Science is foundational, and I guess in days like these it’s almost thrilling to fight those who believe that when you turn a key and your car starts making noise 100 times out of a hundred or you punch in numbers and a bell rings in your friend’s house a continent away then science is good, but when the exact same process of thinking leads you to conclusions that challenge your beliefs science is bad. That in itself is fundamentally unscientific thinking, and it’s shocking to live in a time when it’s in its ascendance, but at least you don’t have to look hard to find the bad guys.
As a researcher and reporter I both love and hate the web. I love how easy it is to find people who know about something I’m trying to learn about, but I hate it too. Instead of a few local sources, or a few gatekeepers who can lead me where I need to go, I’m faced with a panoply of sources, each of whom has strategically keyworded his or her resume or home page to maximize contacts and so only might actually know about the topic I think he or she should. In some ways things like Google books can let me view, in my home, an amazing source like this one, which I ran across in my research on the Beaufort Scale, but in some ways I preferred it when getting off your butt and getting out in the world was job one of a reporter. Like all technology, you still have to manage it and master it, not the other way around.
But the scientific community makes such a great job of working to get information out by using the web that overall it’s just a treat to have that resource. Though hard to find time to do anything else once you click into it.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I think I’ve answered that above, in a way. I love the links I get from scientific friends on Twitter, but if I did nothing but check into and respond to those links that would be my entire day. And almost every link is worth following — that’s the problem. And I do need to do more responding — I need to be a more active part of that community. But then who does my work? As an independent writer I used to tell people I spent 40 percent of my time as a salesperson, 30 percent as a dunning agent, 20 percent in office management, and 10 percent in information technology — and in my spare time I did writing work. And that was before the Internet, much less social media. So it’s murderously difficult to both work and blog and Tweet and so forth. But what are the options?
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I really discovered science blogs through Anton Zuiker’s mistersugar.com. I’m in a science writers’ book club with him, and he’s opened my eyes to the nature of blogging and of scientific blogging especially. Science bloggers are such a specific case of people with the right reasons for blogging and such trustworthy sources that they really are an amazing community as well as a resource. I have loved being even such a sort of Kuiper Belt participant. I turn to them for information all the time now. I LOVE deepseanews.com and a blog around the clock, but honestly I find almost anywhere I turn in the world of science blogging I’m lost for hours finding out about stuff I had never even thought to wonder about.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I would call #scio10 the best conference I’ve ever attended. The session about the future of online communication wondered whether there was any hope for “plain old text blogging” — this at the exact moment that mainstream newspapers are still trying to work out a response to plain old blogging. That makes me feel both hopeless for newspapers and thrilled at the capacities for communication.
But above all #scio10 reminded me what wise people never lose sight of: that “meatspace” is not merely important but the point. With all the Tweeting and blogging and wireless this and Skype that, what brought all those people together was the appreciation of being together. Even with chips in our heads, we’ll remain mammals and real space, real time creatures. I love that #scio never loses track of that, and I think it’s what makes it unique.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. Good luck with the new book and see you soon!

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Jelka Crnobrnja-Isailovic from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I was born and I live in Belgrade, a very unique old city in Southeastern Europe. It is now the capital of the Republic of Serbia. My origins are in the Balkan peninsula (former Yugoslavia), which is one of three important biodiversity refuges of Europe and a famous gene-flow route from east to west, north to south and vice versa. Wonderful diversity of natural and cultural heritage but lot of hard times. So, my professional interest for biodiversity and, unofficially, cultural diversity conservation dates back from my early childhood. I also used to spend a lot of time in virtual space of myths and fairy tales of the world and it turned me into a real, complete cosmopolitan. Now, in many places in the world I really feel at home and do not like borders at all.
My fascination with wilderness, especially snakes, dates back to the time when I was about five years old. Apart from that, I was also very devoted to music and painting, later writing and photography. Thanks to my father, an academic musician, I became familiar with the best of classical music before entering primary school. So, speaking about formal education, it was difficult to choose between journalism, art and science. But, adventurous nature combined with restricted contact with the real wilderness because my parents were very scared of everything (and family opinion was that „girls should play with dolls”), finally directed me to biology. I was formally trained as evolutionary biologist (PhD) with origins in population biology and herpetology (graduate studies). Once I had discovered conservation biology, some 20 years ago, it became my leading star.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
There were almost no chances for young scientists in Serbia to design independent projects before obtaining PhD, what I did in 1997. But, even after that, system was pretty rigid, until beginning of XXI Century. So, I started with first independent project in 2002, focused on evolution of life history traits in some amphibian and reptile species with the idea to apply non-invasive procedures for collecting data and to establish long term monitoring of particular populations for their conservation. Before that, I was mostly oriented toward population genetics and multivariate morphology. In 2003 I won two small grants – that was an amazing feeling after so many years of isolation: Societas Europaea Herpetologica Grant for pilot study on endangered European viper species Vipera ursinii in Montenegro and DAPTF Seed Grant for assessment of Great Crested Newt breeding sites in Serbia. Monitoring of that particular Vipera ursinii population is still in progress and the goal is to establish and maintain good database upon which population status could be regularly checked in the future. I think that I am right when I say that it is the first long term population monitoring of a reptile species in this part of the Balkans, if not in the whole area.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I started with a teaching job some years ago when I realized that it is pretty masochistic trying to stay 100% employed in science in Serbia, especially if you are out of local politics and trying to work honestly in ecology and biodiversity protection. Nowadays, even work with students takes a lot of my time. I am dividing my time between science and teaching at the university. I am teaching Organic Evolution and Conservation Biology at different levels -undergraduate and graduate at Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics at University of Nis, and some aspects of conservation biology on PhD studies at the Biology Faculty at the University of Belgrade. Apart from that, I am devoted to cooperation with IUCN as a member of Amphibian Specialist Group and Red List Assessor Team. Also, I am currently involved in making Strategy of Biodiversity Conservation in Serbia as a member of an UNDP expert team and I would like to take part in changing the system there in a way that young people, trained well during their biology and ecology studies, after reaching graduate level, have real opportunity for jobs in biodiversity conservation. I recognize in my students very strong will to work in biodiversity conservation but most of them, after graduating, must accept completely different jobs for a living or they cannot find job at all, and in the same time there is no continuous biodiversity monitoring in Serbia in local communities at all.
Personally, I would like to complete just one but really good conservation study and think that maybe for that I should move somewhere else where society really appreciates and understands it. And I hope that it will happen. Somewhere in the world, does not matter where, biodiversity is valuable to be protected everywhere in the world.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I was surprised when I realized how much you people in the States are using internet facilities for communication and really want to ask you: do you have time for communication with your family members on the daily basis if, after working hours (and I suppose that your working day lasts at least eight hours), you still have enough energy for blogging? It is really amazing!
For both me and most of my colleagues, simple and fast access to literature is very important. In comparison to the situation some 20 years ago it is better now for sure. Good thing is that Open Access idea is spreading inevitably across the Globe. It is very important to have free access to scientific literature, especially for students and free lancers in science, who have no funds to pay subscriptions to journal editors and libraries.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Science blogs are very interesting but, as I mentioned before, I have no time at the moment to engage myself there as much as I would like to. I am using Facebook for networking with students and colleagues and relatives and friends but have no time to visit it often. Generally, in these days when we face a lot of obstacles such as global economic crisis for example, it is wonderful that there is an alternative for exchange of information; for example, I recently participated in online training organized by IUCN, instead of classical workshop that could cost a lot. Opportunities for cooperation are easier with these new tools and it is good that, using them, you can add some personal dimension to communication, to show to others what are your hobbies, which music do you like, it is important for us as social creatures.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
The first science blog I started to read was A Blog Around The Clock. The title was intriguing; it reminded me of famous “Rock around the Clock” so I took a look in order to find there some nostalgic rock stories from the 60ies. But it was a surprise – and nice surprise I can say – the story was about the science. And, I must confess that my consequent diving into the blog world used to begin from the “Blog Around The Clock” platform.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
This was my first Science Online conference, but not the last, I hope. Diversity of attendants was amazing, looking at their professional backgrounds. The strongest feelings were provoked by all these brave women and men that continue to fight against mediocrity in science.
The idea about meeting places or science motels where freelance scientists could have opportunity to realize their projects is absolutely fabulous, though its realization couldn’t be easy and we discussed a little bit about that at the end of the session. Anyway, it is clear that new organizational patterns for doing science are inevitable, and some modular way of organization seems very realistic.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Hilary Maybaum from i.e.science to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m an East Coaster from the U.S., originally and ultimately a New Yorker, but I spent 14 years of my life in Hawaii. Those years shaped most of scientific approach to the world, for it was there that I earned my Master of Science degree in oceanography. I staged my early training as a scientist at the other side of the world — Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I figure I’m on career #9 or 10 at this stage. My wayward trajectory has been: Teaching Assistant –> Bartender –> Instructor –> Author –> Oceanographer –> Environmental Consultant –> Science Editor –> Grant Director –> Business Owner (Science Writer)
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Running my business, www.iescience.com. I provide science writing and editing services, mostly for educational publishers. I write a lot of textbook material (print) and I develop online activities for publishers’ companion Web sites. Tweeting and blogging are also part of my current career. I still hope I’ll get paid by someone like Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to manage their social media networks and Web content, but I’m happiest working for myself. I’ve yet to write a business plan, though. After three successful years, it would probably be a good idea. But I’m so good at procrastinating.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The evolution of science communication interests me immensely. I’ve seen a lot of changes over the past 20+ years, and I like what I’m seeing now. For example, the other day I was visiting the new online catalog of whale flukes for Southeast Alaska and noticed that full PDFs were attached to each scholarly article referenced on the site. How cool is that! I wish more people would think to include full article citations in their science writing and online journalism, because that’s the best way for people to educate themselves on topics of scientific interest. I know, Bora, that you are an advocate of this and I praise you for your efforts.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I mentioned these earlier, so yes, they are a net positive and, I feel, a necessity in the sense that blogging and tweeting stretch my outreach and networking abilities. I’ll tell you what, though. The National Association of Science Writers doesn’t agree with me. I sent them blog clips from my site, Wet to support my membership application, but NASW promptly rejected them. According to NASW’s director, “self-published or personal blogs do not fit the criteria for clips.”
Despite this official rejection, I have found social networking to be very helpful in non-writing endeavors, such as finding editorial assistants, discovering workshops and conferences (I’m looking at you, ScienceOnline 2010), and even job searching. But the best part for me about social networking is the ability to connect and reconnect with scientists — my favorite group of people!
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I’m an old fan of Seed Magazine; hence, I found ScienceBlogs many years ago. I have recently (in the past 6 months) discovered a plethora of cool science blogs (yours among them, of course!) as a result of my connections on Twitter.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
What I liked best about ScienceOnline 2010 were the physical/mental/spiritual aspects of being among like-minded people of all ages and sizes. I found it to be highly energizing. I think, too, that it was so well organized, with lots of play time and technological opportunities, it was as if every minute was a gift. And to top it all off, I got to sit among an entire table of marine scientists at dinner! That hasn’t happened to me in decades!! So thanks again, Bora and Anton, for a job well done and with heart.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

[Hilary Maybaum aboard the Alvin submersible]

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Kerstin Hoppenhaus from Germany to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I am a filmmaker and journalist with a focus on science and history documentaries. I have been a first-time participant at Science Online this year and am now a freshly hatched blogger at More than Honey, where I write about my ongoing film-project. I live and work in Berlin.
In my previous life I was a biologist, which makes me something between an insider and an outsider, I guess. I have been inside long enough to understand what makes scientists tick, but I am far enough outside to sense what triggers “geek alert” in other people. Being the only scientist in my current work environment, I am probably quite useful as a mediator (sometimes), but also a source of puzzlement for many of my more artistically inclined colleagues (most of the time).
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I studied biology at the Universities of Tübingen and Jena in Germany and this led me directly to working for television in Japan – a result of niche qualification and total ignorance of the system on my part, I guess. I was on a scholarship in Japan at the time and still a biologist, but I already knew that I wasn’t going to stay in science, but become a journalist or something similar instead. So while in Japan, I applied for an internship with a German television broadcaster, totally unaware that foreign studios are widely considered one of the pinnacles of news reporting and hardly ever accept complete novices. It turned out that the only reason why I got in was that it was the year of the World Climate Summit in Kyoto and they were actually quite pleased to have someone aboard to help them sort their H2O from CO2. A fine piece of luck that was, and a great start. I was thrown headlong into the international media machinery and just to be in that gigantic windowless news center full of matte-gray cubicle walls, flickering screens and world class journalists was a thrill, let alone being a legitimate (if tiny) part of it.
After all this excitement I went back to Germany to properly learn the trade and started working as a freelance reporter for local public television in Dresden – news and short pieces on anything from groundbreaking ceremonies (quite common at the time in eastern Germany) to dice snakes along the River Elbe.
Then I went back to school and got me a degree in “Scientific and Industrial Film” (re-named and re-re-named several times since) at Filmacademy Baden-Württemberg with a very interesting interdisciplinary graduation project (an interactive, non-linear film on animal and robot locomotion) in cooperation with German Research Foundation (DFG).
After that: more freelance work in local news and short pieces for tv-science magazines, then first assistant jobs for larger projects and finally my first own documentary series as author and director.
At present, I am researcher, co-author (with director Markus Imhoof) and blogger for my first cinema project, More than Honey, a feature-length documentary about honeybees.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I went into television and film for the moving pictures and the sound. And I have no regrets. They are very powerful tools for communication and they allow you to reach a very wide audience. But there also are some serious limitations. Speed of production is one (the road to film is long and slow) and, more importantly, there is always trouble with abstract concepts and „things-you-cannot-see” in general. Film doesn’t take too well to explanation and certainly not to explaining complex scientific interrelationships.
Film is better for other things. For engaging people in science „en passant”, for example; for a scientific approach implicitly included in „normal” story lines; for science delivered semi-consciously and in healthy doses. For combining science with entertainment. And then, of course, if it has the pictures, it can simply blow you away.
And now, there also is the internet. Now, you can have both. You can reach the wide audience of whatever form television will take in the future and you can communicate in-depth information alongside with it on almost any level of detail you choose. In other words: you can use television to lure people into science (the “gateway-drug“) and then provide them with all sorts of tools to make the subject their own. Play, study, share. Whatever.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I am very interested in exploring new ways of interacting with the audience, especially during production of a film, not just „after the deed”, when the film is released.
We did a series on genealogy a few years ago where a historian was setting out to answer questions about viewers’ family histories. We had a little website up during research and filming and not only did we get quite a few useful hints for archives and material and lots of moral support when we were stuck once again, but we were also repeatedly offered spare parts for the vintage 1979 Lada limousine our historian was driving! Who could ever again want an audience that is only watching?!
Another ongoing interest is finding ways to make the process of science more transparent. Reporting and explaining scientific results is beautiful and important. But there is so much more to science! And there are so many misconceptions about what science is and how it is done. People tend to be very surprised when they learn how messy science can be, how much of it depends on chance and hunches, and how tedious and boring it can drag along at times. But these are good stories and they should be told. I think, film might actually be a good tool for that. Because film is slow and so is science; and film can listen and observe and follow work in progress. It can show that science not just about results, but also a way of doing things.
In this context, I am also very interested in citizen science projects. There is a lot to learn from them about how to involve people in the process of science and I hope that I will have an opportunity to combine film and citizen science projects in the future.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I am clearly not an early adopter with all this and still not very experienced. At the beginning, I was constantly at the point of near-overwhelmedness and impending shut-down, but I am learning to filter and find Twitter an unexpectedly useful tool for that. Also, the novelty does wear off eventually and I am beginning to integrate things somewhat routinely into my workflow.
The bee-project turns out to be a great testing ground – bee-people are very helpful and willing to share and we have already had a lot of interesting input through the blog and through Twitter.
However, it all is still experimental and I would greatly appreciate your feedback!
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I think I drifted into science blogs from science-fiction, really. I had been reading blogs of science-fiction-writers like Peter Watts and Bruce Sterling for quite a while, and, obviously, they often have a fair amount of science in them.
The two lines met, for me, in Henry Gee’s „Futures”-series at Nature (and hopefully will continue to do so until the universe is swallowed by a giant balrog), which then led me to Nature Networks and on to Scienceblogs and Discover, and eventually to many of the independent science blogs out there.
Did I discover new blogs at scio10? Oh yes! There’s Laelaps and Phylogenomics, The Millikan Daily and The Daily Monthly, CogSciLibrarian, The Flying Trilobite and Deep Sea News – and that’s just a few of them!
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
There were many, many interesting sessions, but what impressed me most was the un-conferency format of it all. It seemed so naturally engaging and efficient that you wonder how things could ever have been any different. I think the strong sense of community that many people have pointed out is no accident. Of course, much of it came from the enthusiasm and collegiality of the participants, but it also and in no small part resulted from a very careful orchestration by the organizers.
It started with the warm-up at The Monti and beautiful stories about science, journalism, and inspiration. Just listen to Scott Huler’s Monkey Story. It will make Sidney, the Chimp, your friend for life.
The next day brought workshops and lab tours – both excellent opportunities to meet new people and talk about projects without worrying about missing the next session/ the next great speaker/ lunch… I especially enjoyed the trip to the NC Museum of Science and Nature, where blogger and animal keeper Larry Boles took us on a great tour behind the scenes and into the bear cages.
I can only recommend to make room for those extra days in your schedule next year, especially for people who are new to the scene (like I was), but probably for anybody else just as well.
Also: I was among the lucky people who received one of the sponsored flip-cameras and although I was way to distracted to act much like a filmmaker, I do think that the video snippets that I and others uploaded during and shortly after the event help to convey a good sense of the energy and the discussions.
Overall I took from the conference a sense of huge potential and if I finally made that step and became a blogger myself, I have no doubt that it was largely because of YOU! So, thank you all.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Leah D. Gordon from MEASURE Evaluation to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I am from Portland, Oregon and have been living in the Triangle for 4 years now. I’m a true Oregonian at heart and don’t mind being called a tree-hugging granola.
I can’t say I have formal scientific training, but I married a microbiologist. I am gleaning monitoring and evaluation knowledge from the global health project I work on.
My background is in public relations and communications. I worked for Portland’s mass transportation agency, TriMet for a couple years, and now I am the Knowledge Management Specialist for MEASURE Evaluation.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
What I think is most interesting about the work I do is the ability to connect communities of practitioners with experts both online and in person. People are strengthening their practice, experts are getting great feedback on their research/guidance and are becoming more “reachable.”
In Portland, TriMet did a wonderful job of being accessible to the community by going to stakeholders and community members for input. The agency actually listened. I think organizations are doing a better job of being present but lacking in their ability to LISTEN. At MEASURE Evaluation, I’ve taken what I learned in Portland, and am applying it to a global audience of people working in monitoring evaluation. I think I am in the best time of my career and am excited to see what is to come.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The Certification of Technology and Communication coursework at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism is taking up a lot of my time these days. I am also consulting and implementing public relations and communication strategies for a couple of businesses in the area in addition to working for MEASURE Evaluation full time.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am fascinated with the Internet as an agora for interconnectivity, opinionated thought, and discourse. At what other time in our history, have people expressed themselves so freely and openly? Especially in science! It is also interesting to watch academia adapt to the “power of the web.”
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I’m honestly not a regular blogger, although I would like to and need to as I grow my consultancy. I’m constantly writing for my organization or clients, and seldom my own thoughts. Twitter, however, has changed my life! It’s perfect for this socialista! I have never been able to glean from so many people with similar interests as my own. It’s totally edifying.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs while working for the super awesome Anton Zuiker when he was at UNC Chapel Hill. I had no idea at the time blogging about science was a growing concept on the web.
I discovered Obesity Panacea, and met one of its bloggers, Peter Janiszewski. His blog is relevant and digestible. Keep up the good work!
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
There are so many people from diverse and similar backgrounds to my own. I get a better understanding of researcher’s needs for communication and what they understand and don’t understand about its importance.
In addition, Beth Beck gave me a pearl of wisdom for working with researchers and communicating their knowledge. It was terribly insightful and I will use her approach in my many years to come.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you can join us again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Elia Ben-Ari of the To Be Determined blog to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Thanks for asking! I was born in Israel, came to the U.S. with my parents when I was two years old, and grew up mainly in suburban Long Island, New York. I went to graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where I learned to say y’all and met my wonderful husband. He and I have lived, worked, and played in the Washington, DC, area for the past 21 years–first in Maryland and now in Virginia.
I’m a science writer and editor, focusing on the life sciences. Throughout my somewhat checkered career, I’ve always worked at communicating science clearly and accurately and, I hope, engagingly. I especially enjoy stories where science and the humanities intersect. I love learning new and cool things about biology and following the ups, downs, ins and outs (and gossip) of the science journalism world. I’m a somewhat shy extrovert and have learned that staying connected with people is crucial for my happiness and well being. As for my scientific background, I have an A.B. in biochemistry from Brown University and a Ph.D. in pharmacology from UVA. Signal transduction–that is, how cells convert signals from the outside to events inside the cell–was probably my first true love in science.
The farther along I got in grad school, the less convinced I was that I wanted to be a scientist. But, being stubborn, I finished my Ph.D. and mostly don’t regret it. Like most people who’ve switched from doing science to writing about it, my interests were way too broad for me to be happy focusing on a tiny little area of research. I also was that annoying person who’d point out spelling errors and typos in other people’s posters when they put them up in the hallway before going to a meeting. Writing my dissertation was a breeze compared to finishing up the lab work.
Somewhere along the way I got the idea that I might like being a science writer and conveying my enthusiasm for science to nonscientists, though I wasn’t sure exactly what that involved. I applied for a science journalism fellowship but wasn’t selected. So I decided to take a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute and see how that went.
Two years into a three-year postdoc, I was miserable. My husband encouraged me (that’s putting it mildly) to quit complaining and find a job that I liked. I was incredibly lucky to land a job through an ad I saw in Science as Meeting Reviews Editor at a start-up cell and molecular biology journal, The New Biologist. I was nervous about leaving the lab, but have never looked back. We had a wonderful managing editor, Ruth Kulstad, who mentored me and taught me to edit less timidly. I invited scientists to write reviews of interesting meetings and worked with them in editing their reviews. I got to travel to a few scientific meetings and write about them, including one in the Swiss Alps, on signal transduction. It was a great first job. A year after I started, the journal went under and the five staffers were handed our severance packages. That was my introduction to the real world.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
It’s been more of a meander than a trajectory. After getting laid off from my first job in publishing and making lots of cold calls to network, I managed to convince some folks at the National Institutes of Health that I could write about science for the general public. As a science writer and public information officer for the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), one of the smallest NIH institutes with one of the longest names, I learned a great deal about science and health communications.
After five or so years at NIAMS and a couple of years as Deputy Director (i.e., low-level manager) of the public information office, I was ready for a change, and wanted to try my hand at science journalism. Energized by attending the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, I started searching for a job and was hired as Features Editor at BioScience, a monthly biology journal that has nothing to do with biomedical science.
I had a lot of latitude at BioScience, and wrote about subjects ranging from elephant communication, to botanical illustration (one of my favorites), to geomicrobiology. (Note: Most of the original articles/PDFs with illustrations are behind a paywall.) Another feature story I particularly enjoyed working on was about one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner, and his role in the conservation movement in the U.S. One of the best parts of the job was talking to scientists about their work, and I always gathered way too much information for my stories. I also enjoyed working with the freelancers who wrote for the journal.
While at BioScience I applied for the Marine Biological Laboratory’s science journalism fellowship in environmental science and was thrilled to be accepted. Thus followed a fun and stimulating week in Woods Hole, doing hands-on science that was very different from the lab work I was used to (I’d never had to don hip waders before), and talking science writing and journalism with other writers.
I left BioScience after some changes at the journal and decided to try my hand at freelancing. That was longer ago than I care to admit. As a freelancer I’ve done a wide range of writing and editing for various audiences (are you sensing a theme here?), including straight journalism and work for nonprofits and several NIH institutes. I wrote a couple of stories for the now-defunct health section of the Washington Post, and still write occasionally for BioScience. I helped the NY-based Alliance for Lupus Research launch a quarterly newsletter for its constituencies, wrote all the content for the newsletter, and did other writing for the organization. I wrote a short piece about microbial biofilms for National Wildlife, and interviewed two malaria researchers visiting from Mali for a story I wrote for an NIH publication. Those are just a few of the highlights that spring to mind.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Meanwhile, my goal in my work remains to communicate clearly and accurately about science, and to do so as engagingly as possible. I also want to keep honing my writing skills, and maybe explore new forms of writing such as the personal essay. I want to continue learning new things and keep up with biology, new technologies, and the ever-changing landscape of science communication and journalism. And stay young forever, of course. But if I can’t do that, I want to age gracefully.
On the work front, at the moment I have a freelance contract to write part-time for the National Cancer Institute’s Office of Communications and Education. I’ve been writing various materials for the public, which go up on the Web at cancer.gov. And I may soon have more work for another NIH institute. I’m hoping I’ll still have time and energy to do some freelance journalism, and perhaps I’ll decide to focus more on that again in the future. I’m open to new and interesting opportunities. I’ve also just become a board member for the DC Science Writers Association.
My work is important, but it’s not my life. I have too many other interests: spending time with my husband, friends, and family (and our cat, Minou), yoga, photography, reading (mainly fiction), theater, travel, cooking, cross-country skiing, getting outdoors and enjoying nature. I could go on. I often describe myself as a dabbler, but someone I know said I was a Renaissance woman, which sounds so much better, don’t you think?
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
As a dabbler–er, I mean Renaissance woman–I’m interested in just about everything related to science communication, including the use of the Web as well as more traditional media. I hope the Web will help in communicating science more effectively and engagingly to a larger public, because I think that’s critical for an enlightened society. So many issues that we face in the world are related to science, and not enough people have the basic knowledge to understand those issues. If I can contribute to that knowledge in some small way, I’ll be pleased.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I came home from ScienceOnline2010 feeling reenergized and excited about communicating science, and decided to start a blog, which I called To Be Determined. But I’m still figuring out how to keep up with it and what to write about. I don’t see it as a central part of my work right now. It’s more of an opportunity to experiment with my writing, which I mentioned is a goal, and perhaps show off some of my photos, too.
I got hooked on Twitter about a year ago, after attending a panel discussion on social media for science writers at a DC Science Writers Association event. (As you know, I tweet as @smallpkg.) I then wrote a story on scientists and Twitter for BioScience, and that’s what led me to you, Bora, and ultimately to the ScienceOnline2010 meeting. I view Twitter as being more for my professional side, and find it great for keeping up with what other science writers and people in the journalism and writing worlds are doing and saying, getting links to interesting blog posts and articles that I might not find otherwise, and connecting with all sorts of interesting people. I use Facebook mainly for social purposes, though I’ve posted links to some of my blog posts on Facebook as well as Twitter.
For me, all the online activity is a bit of a mixed blessing, though I see it as a net positive that is necessary for keeping up with the times and with my field. I love finding interesting, clever, or thought-provoking blog posts and stories about science and medicine. I enjoy being active on Twitter and Facebook and keeping up with people and events that way, but they can be a time sink and a great way to procrastinate on getting my writing assignments done. I try to contribute to Twitter when I can, rather than just lurking there, and I enjoy having an online persona via Twitter. I just wish I could get by on less sleep so I could spend more time online and get more work done.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I’m not sure, but I think the first science blogs I read may have been on the NY Times website. I started reading a lot more blogs after I began using Twitter. Many of the blogs I read are written by people who were at the conference, and I tend to dip in and sample sporadically and as time permits. I hate to name favorites, but some that I enjoy and find thoughtful are Ivan Oransky’s Embargo Watch, Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview, Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science, DeLene Beeland’s Wild Muse, David Kroll’s Terra Sigillata, David Dobbs’s Neuron Culture, and of course your A Blog Around the Clock.
What were the best aspects of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best aspects for me were meeting new and interesting people, the mix of participants from different fields, and the “un-conference,” participatory nature of the sessions. I’ve rarely felt so comfortable chiming in at a meeting. It was also great meeting people whom I’d known only via Twitter until then. And as I mentioned, all the talk about blogging inspired me to start my own blog. The conference also gave me renewed energy for being a science communicator and participating in that community. As for next year, I think it will be a challenge to include as many people as possible while maintaining the relatively intimate nature of the conference. And who knows, I may even come up with an idea for a session for ScienceOnline2011.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Joanne Manaster from Joanne Loves Science to answer a few questions.
Where does blogging fit into what I do?
I began my website about two years ago, while I was in a bit of a life crisis. As everything was chaotic, I thought, “What has ALWAYS been true about me and will always be true?” and the answer was, “I love science”. Hence the website was christened “Joanne Loves Science”. At first, it was to be a vehicle for delivering stem cell and tissue engineering news (to replace a newsletter I had previously published). Clearly I am not doing that anymore. I mention this because I think it takes time for a website or blog to find its personality, so my advice to someone beginning a blog or website is to start writing about what interests you and allow your enthusiasm to shine through. You will eventually find the tone you wish to convey to the world.
I made a decision, based on time constraints, to not accept comments on my posts, although I can turn them on at anytime if it should seem worthwhile. My “About Joanne” page is quite long, as this has grown out of a demand from young people, especially young ladies, to get a sneak peek at my life, especially the modeling career. Happily, I am much more well-known now for my outreach currently than I ever was while modeling. This is very gratifying as I would much rather be known for adding a bit of intellectual value to society than merely being a pleasant object to look at. That being said, thanks to good genes and some tricks one learns while modeling, I am still maintaining a youthful exterior that belies my years of experience in academia, and I thought I should use that while I can. My telegenicity (or, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said of me, my “youtube-genicity”) has come in handy to find new ways to reach to the general public about science.
A quick look at my site will demonstrate three main topics/beliefs I maintain:

• There are numerous popular science books out there for your enjoyment and enrichment. I hope to share my love for these books (and gratitude to the authors) by demonstrating the variety of books available. I like the concept of promoting books for many reasons, which should probably be written in a carefully constructed blog post!
• Everyday items have science behind them, in them, etc. I sometimes demonstrate this via the science of beauty, which is, by far, the most popular page of my website after the first page. I also use common/unusual items (gummy bears) to highlight simple scientific concepts.
• The basics of the scientific method and how scientists conduct and communicate their work are very important and I am trying to gently reintroduce these concepts to my readers. Most American students have heard the same boring lessons about the scientific method a handful of times, but seldom grasp it fully and then are left befuddled by the significance or validity of scientific (or pseudoscientific) findings, possibly leading to misunderstandings and misconceptions about scientific topics.

With respect to the book recommendations, I try to make a point to meet any science author who comes near to town. At the very least, I hope to express my gratitude for the work they do in making science accessible. If I have more time, I appreciate a nice conversation because I am a great admirer of intelligence and enthusiasm, both of which authors simply must possess. This is just pure selfishness on my part! My life has been extraordinarily enriched by the interactions with the ones I’ve communicated.
I recently met Jonah Lehrer when he came into town. He graciously spent some time with me and even helped create this video about the continuum of scientific expertise using my growing Barbie doll collection. He is quite the sport.
I would like to point out, for those of you who are new to my videos, that while I have experience “working the camera”……








































…..I have much to learn about operating one, so the video is slightly crooked, not centered and the lighting leaves something to be desired. I notice in particular that this one has many blips and skips which I suspect is an effect of uploading in less than optimal internet connections and my poor editing skills. Hopefully the content more than makes up for this! Grab a cup of coffee or tea or a beer and sit back and watch as Jonah drops his cell phone (oops) and confesses his predilection for blue bracelets.

What next? Carl Zimmer and Matchbox cars? Steven B. Johnson and Hungry, Hungry Hippo? Rebecca Skloot and Candyland?
About twitter and other social media, but mostly twitter:
Twitter has been a wonderful experience for me. Allow me to bullet point the benefits I have experienced by using twitter:

• It has been a fabulous way to promote my videos and get the word out, hopefully to the appropriate audience.
• I am learning to become a better science communicator by watching carefully how other great science communicators do their jobs!
• I have been richly rewarded by new friendships and collaborations I have made on twitter.
• I enjoy leaving an “open door ” to the public in order to indicate that I am available to carry on a rational and friendly exchanges about science. I follow most people back because I have discovered that a seemingly “random” person will pipe in with comments such as “That was interesting.” Or “Can you answer such and such?” And if I can’t answer, my contacts might be able to do so.
• I’ve learned to set some personal boundaries on the internet, often learning this the hard way, unfortunately (particularly on youtube). It has been a surprisingly gratifying skill. I’m also learning to discern those who want to start an argument just for the sake of arguing or those who are trying to trick me into supporting their pseudoscience or to help them promote themselves. These people, frankly, take away time from those who have a genuine interest and curiosity about science and I’m learning to deal with them effectively.

How did I discover science blogs?
How does anyone discover anything on the internet these days? By accident, of course. I’m sure I was looking up particular bits of information and came across one blog, then another, and another. I use the information in these blogs, frequently visiting ones with reliable and well documented information. I enjoy reading information and opinions from great science communicators!
And finally, you ask, what about my future plans?
Honestly, I have so many ideas, it’s a little ridiculous. I hope to continue communicating science, gaining a larger audience for the cause of quality and entertaining science. If I have to manipulate the entire world with gummy bears, cats, Barbie dolls, (and coming soon: cookies!), a giant helping of whimsical, lacy, heart-shaped Midwest charm coming from a fresh-faced biologist, then I’m going to do it. Unabashedly.
I made a promise to myself that I would never do anything on a video that I haven’t done in class. Well, it looks now as if I will have to sing in class. Yep, I sang in the next video. Why? Because thinking about science makes me so happy, I want to sing. That, or I just felt during some lapse of reasoning, that you all might want to see me sing a bouncy pop song and add scientific commentary. Why should musicians get a corner on metaphor? Pedantic’s where it’s at!

It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Carmen Drahl, Associate Editor for Science/Technology/Education at Chemical & Engineering News (find her as @carmendrahl on Twitter) to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be interviewed, Bora.
Good conversations make me happy. School was fun for me (well, maybe not grad school) and that’s evolved into a desire to always be learning something new. I enjoy doing nothing as much as I enjoy doing things. On Mondays, if I’m not too busy, I take hip-hop dance classes.
My hometown is Hackettstown, New Jersey. M&M’s are made there. I got a bachelor’s in chemistry from Drew University and a Ph.D. in chemistry at Princeton. Scientifically my expertise hovers somewhere around the interface between organic chemistry and biochemistry. A short while after defending my dissertation, I moved to Washington DC to write for Chemical & Engineering News, and that’s where I’ve been for almost three years now.
When and how did you first discover science blogs?
Scandal led me to science blogs. Seriously. In March 2006 I was still an organic chemistry grad student. Everyone in my lab was buzzing about a set of retractions in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (disclosure: today I work for the American Chemical Society, which publishes JACS). A rising young organic chemistry star retracted the papers because work by one of his graduate students couldn’t be reproduced. It was a big deal and became an even bigger deal as the inevitable rumors (salacious and otherwise) surfaced. The blogosphere had the details first. So that’s where Google pointed me and the other members of my lab when we searched for more information. I learned about the awesome (but sadly now defunct) blogs Tenderbutton and The Endless Frontier, by Dylan Stiles and Paul Bracher, both chemistry grad students like me. I also discovered the solid mix of chemistry and pharma at Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline, which is still the first blog I visit every day.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
By the time I discovered science blogs I knew my career goals were changing. I’d already been lucky enough to audit a science writing course at Princeton taught by Mike Lemonick from TIME, and thought that maybe science writing was a good choice for me. After reading chemistry blogs for a while I realized “Hey, I can do this!” and started my own blog, She Blinded Me with Science, in July 2006. It was the typical grad student blog, a mix of posts about papers I liked and life in the lab.
At C&E News I’ve contributed to its C&ENtral Science blog, which premiered in spring 2008. I’ve experimented with a few different kinds of posts- observations and on-the-street interviews when I run into something chemistry-related in DC, in-depth posts from meetings, and video demos of iPod apps. One of my favorite things to do is toy with new audio/video/etc technology for the blog.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
In March I just started a new era in my web existence- I’m becoming a pharma blogger. I’m the science voice at The Haystack, C&E News’s new pharma blog and one of seven new blogs the magazine launched last month. My co-blogger is the talented Lisa Jarvis, who’s written about the business side of pharma for ten years and who brings a solid science background to the table as well. I kicked us off by liveblogging/livetweeting a popular session at the American Chemical Society’s meeting in San Francisco where drug companies reveal for the first time the chemical structures of potential new drugs being tested in clinical trials. The whole thing synced to FriendFeed as well. Folks followed the talks from all three venues, which was great. I hope I can continue doing that sort of thing in the future.
For this August, I’m co-organizing a mini-symposium at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston about the chem/pharma blogosphere and its impact on research and communication. I’m in the process of inviting speakers right now. It’s my first time doing anything like this and part of me is petrified that no one will show up. Tips on organizing a conference session and how not to stress when doing so are welcome!
More broadly, I’d love to get more chemistry bloggers to connect with the community that attends ScienceOnline. I don’t ever want to become that old (or not-so-old) person who is clueless about them-thar newfangled whosiwhatsits that the kids are using nowadays.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
A few things come to mind, actually. I’d like to think that the web has made grad school a helluva lot less isolating for science grad students. You have the virtual journal clubs like Totally Synthetic, posts like SciCurious’s letter to a grad student, etc.
As a journalist the web’s capacity to equalize fascinates me. I’m extremely lucky to have a staff gig as a science writer without having gone to journalism school or landed a media fellowhip and it’s weird to think that my old blog might’ve helped my visibility. I didn’t know Ed Yong’s story until Scio10 but I think he’s a highly talented example of how the web can open doors.
The web’s equalizing power goes to readers of science content as well as writers, of course. In the ideal situation a reader can give a writer instant feedback and you can get a real conversation going, something that was much harder with the snail-paced system of letters to the editor and reader surveys. Not that the conversation is always civil. Most of C&EN’s readers have a decent amount of scientific training, but the debate that rages whenever we run an editorial about climate change is as intense as any I’ve seen.
In cases like that I don’t know that the web gives people a good representation of what the consensus is. For folks who don’t have scientific training, how do you ensure that people don’t just go to the content that already confirms their pre-existing beliefs about autism or global warming? John Timmer touched on this more eloquently in his interview with you, and I agree with him that I don’t think we have an answer yet. Though on a slightly different note, I will mention that I’ve been enjoying the New York Times’s recent attempts to recapture the spontaneity of flipping through the newspaper in online browsing, like the Times Skimmer for Google Chrome.
What are some of your favourite science blogs? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
In addition to the blogs I’ve already mentioned I enjoy <a href="http://www.coronene.com/blog/&quot;Carbon-Based Curiosities, Wired Science, Chemistry Blog, and Terra Sigillata, to name a few of the 50 or so blogs on my feed reader.
I discovered scads of new blogs at Scio10 but I’ll focus on the one that’s become required reading for me these days: Obesity Panacea. I’d covered obesity drug development for C&EN but I’d never met Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski or heard of their blog until the conference.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Dave Mungeris my hero – his blogging 102 session was packed with practical tips that I brought back to C&EN for incorporating into our blogs, such as the use of the Disqus plugin for catching conversations on social networks, getting smart about using stats and surveys, etc. Some of that’s already happened, and some of the ideas are still in the works.
I came for the nuts-and-bolts blogging tips but I stayed for the conversations, especially the ones at the bar after the official program was done for the night. And the icing on the cake was seeing folks I’d worked with but never met, like Cameron Neylon and you, Bora, and catching up with people I hadn’t seen in months, like Jean-Claude Bradley, Aaron Rowe, Jennifer Ouellette and Nancy Shute.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Ernie Hood to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around the Clock. Would you please tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Hi Bora. Thanks for your interest, and for all that you do.
I’m one of those science writers who comes to the profession from the writing side as opposed to the science side. I have a BA in English from Brown University and an MA in Communications from UNC-Chapel Hill. After grad school, I worked in local television news for a few years (great training for working on tight deadlines), and then a partner and I started a video and audio production company, where I plied my trade for the ensuing twenty years. Working with science-based corporate clients such as Glaxo-GlaxoWellcome-GSK, Rhone Poulenc, Ciba Giegy, Organon Teknika and many more, I eventually discovered my love of science and an ability to communicate scientific concepts simply and effectively. In 2003, after dabbling in science writing on the side for a few years, I elected to pursue it full time. Becoming a freelancer was and is nerve-wracking (just ask one), but I’ve never looked back and thoroughly enjoy what I do.
I like to think that my work makes some small contribution to bettering the world through enhanced appreciation of science–that’s much more rewarding than contributing to some corporation’s profit margin. And I’ve found that scientists are much easier to work with and more appreciative of quality work.
Geographically, I was born and raised in a suburb of Boston (go Sox!), spent some years in Florida, moved to Chapel Hill in 1976 to attend grad school (go Heels!), and have been here in the Triangle ever since. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’ve been fortunate to work on a wide variety of engaging projects over the course of my career. For example, in the mid-90s my production company produced a weekly, national magazine show on PBS called BreakThrough: Television’s Journal of Science and Medicine, which aired on more than 200 stations, won several international awards, and was warmly received by the scientific community. I was Senior Writer on the show, contributing studio and promotional copy while supervising and editing the work of our team of reporter/field producers. It was an intense experience that has served me well to this day in terms of developing a passion for the science and for getting it right without pandering or sensationalizing.
In my second career as a science writer, I’ve written more than 80 articles for Environmental Health Perspectives, the monthly journal published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the flagship journal in the environmental health field. I’ve attended numerous scientific conferences and written meeting reports. I’ve written or edited several book chapters, including twice contributing chapters to the NIH Director’s Biennial Report to Congress. I’ve even been a co-author of two peer-reviewed publications, which was quite a thrill for this English major. I also perform a variety of writing and editing tasks for several academicians around the country. More recently, drawing on my media production experience, I’ve been producing podcasts for several clients–great fun.
What is taking up most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Much (too much!) of my time these days is taken up by two volunteer labors of love–my radio show and SCONC.
For the past four years, I’ve hosted a weekly science interview radio show on WCOM-FM in Carrboro, North Carolina, called Radio In Vivo: Your Link to the Triangle Science Community. Each week I bring in a Triangle-area scientist and we discuss his or her work for an hour, which allows a thorough, in-depth examination. I’ve had guests from all walks of science (including Bora Z himself, of course!). It’s quite a challenge to book new guests and prepare for each week’s show, sometimes on a rather steep learning curve, but I never tire of helping scientists communicate about their work and promoting the scientific enterprise here in the Triangle. There are now more than 140 hour-long shows in the archive at the program’s website, radioinvivo.net. I also serve on three different committees at the radio station, doing what I can to help support and sustain WCOM–a remarkable example of all-volunteer community radio at its best.
I’ve also had the honor and privilege of serving as president of Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC) since 2009. We put on events monthly at area venues, typically featuring a speaker or two along with time for socializing, networking, and good food and drink. We seek to aid our members’ work opportunities and professional development, and to showcase the extremely important function our profession fulfills, serving as the vital liaison between the scientific community and the diverse audiences to be addressed.
Goals? Well, the chances of playing left field for the Red Sox or being a rock star or a pro bass fisherman seem increasingly remote these days, so I guess today I’ll settle for maintaining my health, watching my daughters thrive as adults, and eventually, dare I say it, hanging out with some grand-kids!
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I think my favorite element of science communication is simply the joy of constantly discovering fascinating new developments, and sometimes having the opportunity to introduce them to a wider audience. I don’t need to remind your readers how cool science is, and it’s thrilling to use the many new tools at our disposal to send that message out to folks who do need to be reminded–or informed in the first place…or disabused of misconceptions and misinformed opinions. We need all of the virtual weapons we can get in our ongoing battle against ignorance, apathy, and politically motivated misrepresentation.
How does blogging figure in your work? How about social networks? Do you find all of this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
So far I don’t blog, and I marvel at people like you who do, and who generate so much material all the time. When you say A Blog Around the Clock, I think you must mean that you actually do blog around the clock, and I can’t begin to understand how you aren’t chronically sleep-deprived. I do follow several blogs, such as yours, Terra Sigillata, Deep Sea News, Science in the Triangle, and Mister Sugar, for example. Also I consult blogs frequently in the course of my reporting and writing work and when preparing for radio interviews.
As for social networks, I am on Facebook and Twitter, although I tend to lurk more than actively post. I just can’t imagine anyone caring what mood I might be in at any given time, or the fact that I’m drinking coffee somewhere. With that caveat in mind, I do find the networks to be valuable for staying in touch with the professional community and for publicizing new editions of the radio show and upcoming SCONC events. Sometimes it’s difficult to ignore all the chatter – the social networks are quite addictive and can be a distraction. On the other hand, they’re a great way to keep one’s ears to the ground. Does the word ambivalent come to mind?
What was the best aspect of Science Online 2010 for you?
This was my third year at the conference, and it just keeps getting better and more valuable. I was especially pleased at the breadth of the content this year, with the program expanding far beyond its roots in strictly covering science blogging. As we’ve seen, the many disparate elements of science communication are blending together in exciting new ways, and the meeting certainly reflected that trend. Also, as so many of your respondents have mentioned, it was a terrific opportunity to meet and interact with some of the most accomplished people in our field, face to face in “meat space.”
I was one of the recipients of a Flip video camera at the conference, and spent a good bit of time shooting interviews and posting them to YouTube. I was amazed by the quality of the image emerging from a camera the size of a transistor radio, the 2-hour digital recording capacity of the device, and the ease of operation and uploading. Took me way back to my TV news days, when it took two people and a camera and recorder weighing 40 pounds each to shoot on 15-minute tapes the size of a hard-back book. We’ve come a very long way! It’s exciting to contemplate the potential uses for this groundbreaking technology – I’m sure we’re just seeing our first glimpses of its capabilities and possible applications. From now on, there’s little excuse not to have video in our scientific communications when it’s become so easy and so powerful. I just hope we’ll keep the quality up and not put out mediocre material just because we can. We don’t do that in our writing, and we should not succumb to the temptation to do so in other communications. Small soapbox issue there…
Thanks, Bora – see you next year at Science Online 2011!
Thank you so much for the interview. And see you at the next SCONC event!

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Beth Beck from NASA to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a political scientist with almost 25 years in the federal government. I work at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C. I have an undergraduate degree in Government from the University of Texas with concentration on language, specifically Spanish. My grad degree comes from the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin. I am a non-techie working in NASA techie-land.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m a communicator. An extrovert among introverts. I don’t see the world as others do, but how boring would life be if we all agreed?
I started my federal career as a Fellow in the Terrorism Analysis office at the CIA. Terrorism was new to the U.S. at the time. 9/11 changed all that. I wrote my grad thesis on International Cooperation to Combat Terrorism, then I accepted a job at NASA. Go figure.
I started out at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. When I was assigned to the task force commissioned by President George H.W. Bush to look at options for returning to the Moon and Mars, I ended up at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. My job: to craft a 30-year organizational structure to allow NASA creative flexibilities to manage an evolving Moon/Mars program. I still have the file from the early 90’s.

We changed directions, so I accepted a permanent job at Headquarters in the Space Station office. During my time at Headquarters, I’ve moved a good deal – usually due to internal reorganizations. I worked with our international partners for five years. Another five in Public Affairs with a long stint as Editor of NASA.gov. I served as a LEGIS Fellow in the Senate for a year. Now I’m the Outreach Program Manager for the Office of Space Operations – five years so far. Yes, I’m a rolling stone.
I think my most memorable experience at NASA was the day we nearly sparked World War III. Short story: we partnered with the Norwegians on NASA’s Sounding Rocket campaign. We launched our instruments on their Black Brandt XII rockets off the coast of Norway. The Russians thought they were incoming missiles. Lots of drama. And yes, fingers were poised on red retaliation buttons for one hair-raising second before calm prevailed. The Norwegians sent me a T-shirt with a picture of the rocket and the caption: “I almost caused WWIII!”
Everything I work on is interesting .(Ok, almost everything.) Not the paper and process – but the programs themselves. A few stand out:
1. The end of the Space Shuttle program in September.
2. Completion of Space Station assembly this year.
3. NASA and social media – specifically Launch/Mission Tweet-ups.
4. LAUNCH Water sustainability forum. http://launch.org
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The coolest project EVER!!!!! LAUNCH.org is our wildly-successful sustainability incubator. I’m sure I have words to express how THRILLED we are at our first event a few weeks ago. We’ve been sweating blood to make it happen for the last year.
Our goal: Accelerate Innovation for a Sustainable Future.
We’d been looking for ways to tell our Space Station green story, and this concept fit the bill. We pulled together a team of creative folks, all bringing together different strengths, to birth the LAUNCH:Water incubator.
We wanted a TED-style event but with teeth, where we can chomp into issues and mash-up new approaches and solutions.
We created LAUNCH.org as a global initiative to identify and support the innovative work that is poised to contribute to a sustainable future. We want this process to accelerate solutions to meet urgent challenges facing our society. That’s the goal: to make a difference, leave this world better tomorrow than it is today.
We chose water as a logical starting point because it’s an issue we deal with on Space Station every day in orbit. Not only is water a critical commodity for our orbiting pioneers, but for so many living on our home planet.
You can view the Innovator videos online, thanks to our partner Nike: http://launch.org/forums/
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
Social media interests me. I love finding new ways to communicate. Keeping up with the changing landscape of technology and applications is a FULL-time job. I barely skim the surface, but what a fun time skimming cream off the top!
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I LOVE social media, though I spend most my time on Twitter, Facebook and blogging. I like the fact that I can follow blogs now by signing up through Twitter or Facebook. I use Google Reader, but I have to take time to go read everything in my reader. I like the blogs to drop in my email so I don’t have to do anything but read them. I’m lazy! I want info to come to me, rather than have to search it out. I haven’t really caught on to Google Wave or Buzz. Twitter already meets that need. Wave takes time to be creative, and I haven’t invested the time to use it creatively.
NET POSITIVE!!! For NASA, we have a new community built around social media interaction. I have new friends I’ve met through Twitter/Facebook who’ve attended our Tweet-ups. Now we’re friends in real life, in addition to digital life.
Social media is expanding my universe!
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Science blogs discovered me. Karen James (@kejames) and I met on Twitter through her space passion. She’d just recently connected with Space Station astronaut Mike Barratt, who participated in her Beagle Project with a downlink live from Station.
Karen invited me to join the panel on Science Online 2010 – which was an amazingly cool experience. I’m thrilled to be part of your community now. And, by the way, Karen is Mike’s guest to his upcoming launch: STS-133, our final mission of the Space Shuttle program – if our current schedule holds.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I absolutely LOVED the session with the students. Changed the way I see technology applications – through their eyes. I’d love to have them rate OUR websites, social media activities next year. They can be our future leader consultants. We could submit projects to them, let them choose their favs, and tell us why. (I’d rather not do the best/worst list on stage. I’d hate to find NASA ones on the bottom.)
Might be fun to have them schedule one-on-one time with us to give us feedback. Good experience for them to provide consultation. Good experience for us to hear the naked truth – no matter how painful.
Love, love, love them!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Sabine Vollmer to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a journalist by trade and a thrill seeker by nature. There’s nothing more thrilling to me than Eureka! moments, my own and those of others. That’s why I chose to study journalism instead of biochemistry, why I left Germany to come to the U.S., why I enjoy reporting more than writing. Writing keeps me sane, but finding out stuff I didn’t know keeps me going. In the more than 20 years I worked for newspapers, I covered just about everything: Crime (too emotionally draining), politics (too much hot air), business (too much granularity, not enough color) and science. I got stuck on science about 10 years ago after moving
to North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the Eureka! moments keep on coming.
Becoming a science writer was a logical step for me, because I’ve always been interested in science, particularly in biology and chemistry. I took a heavy load of biochemistry classes in high school (German high school is different from American high school), but selected mass communication as my major at the university in Munich. I have never regretted my decision, because it has allowed me to experience scientific breakthroughs without having to toil in the lab doing experiments over and over again.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Most of my expertise is in the life sciences. My sweet spot is where business and research intersect, mainly because those stories dominate in the RTP area. I moved here to cover biotech, pharma and health care for the Triangle Business Journal and then switched to the News & Observer to essentially write about the same things.
About a year ago, my job at the N&O got cut in a massive, nationwide McClatchy layoff, which so far has been largely a blessing. Now, I get to focus more on the science than the business angles, I get to mingle with scientists and I have more outlets. In the past year, I met three Nobel Prize laureates, including Ada Yonath, a 2009 winner in chemistry. Compare that to a big, fat 0 in the previous eight years while I was a staff writer with a regular paycheck and benefits.
My stories are now published on Science in the Triangle, an online publication that tracks research activities in the RTP area, and in the Science & Technology pages in the N&O and the Charlotte Observer.
Science in the Triangle is a current interesting project. Past interesting projects include a story about AZT, the first HIV/AIDS drug that was developed in RTP, and a couple of investigative stories about laser assisted in-situ keratomileusis, or LASIK. The AZT story was a doorway into HIV/AIDS research, a very active area in RTP, and Harvard Medical School picked it up and posted it on its Web site. The LASIK stories have since garnered the interest of a national magazine.
I’m still waiting for the curse part to hit.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The RTP area generates a wealth of research in a number of different disciplines. Until four or five years ago, local media did an adequate job chronicling the activities. But when the bottom fell out in the newspaper industry, the local science coverage started to decline in quality and quantity. I just couldn’t bear the thought that all this local knowledge would become largely inaccessible to the general public and that the research silos that exist would become more impenetrable. I couldn’t and I can’t imagine how that would improve an area I came to appreciate for its intellectual vitality and cultural diversity.
I spend a lot of time applying my skills and expertise trying to fill the holes in the local science coverage, generate enough income to help feed and house the family and learn from the mistakes my former employers made and are still making.
My goal is to make a national name for myself writing about research and development in the RTP area.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I’d like to see a business model for online science writing emerge that values quality content and provides broad access to new ideas.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogs come in different flavors. I’m trying to find time to start a personal blog and keep it going. For now, most of my blogging is for Science in the Triangle, where I provide information and analysis rather than opinion. I absolutely love Twitter, because it’s fast and insightful if you follow the right people. Basically, I use Twitter like a science wire service, to get ideas and to distribute blog posts. My twitter handle is @SciTri. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but I wouldn’t want to be without any of my social networks.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I’m still discovering them and have yet to form much of an opinion. I do find them very interesting as blueprints of publishing alternatives to the traditional, or “dead-tree” as you call it, media.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The Eureka! moments, of course. It was my first ScienceOnline conference and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was great. It brought me up-to-date with a world I realized I knew nothing about as a staff writer for the dead-tree media. The networking was particularly fruitful for me. What I hope next year’s conference will address more and more specifically is a possible business model for online science writing. We need to figure out how to shift from paper to online and still be able to pay the bills.
It is great working with you. I am glad you made it to ScienceOnline2010 and thank you for the interview.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Maria-Jose Vinas to answer a few questions:
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Glad to be here! I come from Barcelona, Spain, and my relationship with science has been complicated in the past, although we’re in good terms now. See, in the Spanish educational system there isn’t anything similar to American colleges – after high school, you go straight into a professional school. At 18, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to be in life. My mom did: she wanted her daughter to be a medical doctor. But in a rebellious outburst I decided to go to veterinary school instead (it was a pretty tame rebellion, I admit). In summary, I found out quite soon that veterinary medicine wasn’t the right thing for me, but I still went ahead and graduated, and even worked as a vet for two years (in a pig farm in France, and in the lab at the Universitat AutÚnoma de Barcelona). By the time I decided to go back to school to study journalism, I had promised myself I would never, ever have anything else to do with science.

What made you change your mind?
I was already working as a reporter (in a pretty dull job) when I got a call from one of my teachers from journalism school. He was the editor-in-chief of a Sunday magazine, and he wanted to run a story on the boom of biomedical research in Barcelona during the previous 5-10 years. He remembered I was a vet, so he asked if I could write that article. I had so much fun reporting for that story! I got to talk to some of the top-notch scientists in Spain; they were bright, they were passionate about what they did, they didn’t mind sitting down with me for hours to talk about their science. I then realized that although I was not meant to be a scientist (or not a vet, at least), I would never get tired of writing about science. It’s the perfect subject for people with short attention spans, like me; science is always evolving, there’s always something new to learn and write about. So I applied for a fellowship for graduate studies in the United States, got it, and moved to California to get a science-writing graduate degree at UC Santa Cruz.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I had a two-year fellowship, so I spread one year of classes over two years and doubled the internships. I did six half-time internships (at the SETI podcast, “Are we alone?” — I loved the experience so much!–, two at local newspapers, two at press offices, and one in a film-production company) and a final, full-time summer internship at The Chronicle of Higher Education. I needed a lot of practice, since I wasn’t only changing reporting fields, I was also switching to a foreign language. In October 2008, I got my first job as a science writer/press officer for the American Geophysical Union, the largest association of Earth and space scientists. It’s been a blast: working for AGU, I get to write about a very wide array of sciences, and organize press conferences at big meetings. Plus, our scientists are some of the coolest around (may I say geoscientists rock?)

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Right now, I have three fledgling projects. One is managing and expanding AGU’s social media presence. Another is creating a collection of blogs for AGU. And finally, I started teaching science communication workshops at scientific meetings some months ago and loved the experience, so now I would like to expand my reach with online training materials, and a blog dedicated to science communication.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I’m glad you ask! I created a Facebook page for AGU about a year ago that now has over 2,800 fans. I also manage the AGU Twitter account, though I must admit that I didn’t create one for myself until I attended ScienceOnline2010. What do I get from social media? You see, I’m in a curious situation as a press officer at AGU; my scientists are based in hundreds of research institutions in many countries. The only chance I get to see them is at meetings, and everybody’s super busy at conferences. So the AGU social networks allow me to interact a bit more with the scientists, even if it’s only with a very small fraction of them (AGU has around 58,000 members). Social networks also allow me to find researchers who’re interested in science outreach, and to learn about and then share interesting news on Earth and space science. In addition to that, I network and chat with other science writers through my personal Twitter account.
And about the blogs: we currently have three blogs up and running, one on the science presented at AGU meetings, another one on geohazards, and finally, my pet project: The Plainspoken Scientist, a blog on science communication for scientists. This topic fascinates me, and I’ll use the blog to make a case for science outreach, to showcase researchers who are already doing a great job in communicating their science to the public, and to provide tips and a discussion forum on how make science more appealing to everybody. In the near (I hope) future, we will be taking guest contributions from veteran geobloggers, and also using the blogs as a training ground for researchers who would like to communicate their science to the public, but don’t have much experience yet.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I discovered science blogs about four years ago, and now I have dozens of blog feeds in my Google Reader, including quite a few geoblogs. Two of my favorites are Dot Earth and CJR’s The Observatory. I’m also addicted to reading posts about science communication and climate change communication, no matter the blog they come from.
More than helping me discover cool new blogs, ScienceOnline2010 helped me discover cool new tweeters that I now follow, such as you (@BoraZ), @j_timmer, @cliftonwiens, @oystersgarter, and many more. When you guys tweet about good blog posts, I go read them. It’s a fantastic referral service.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 was how energizing it was to be surrounded by such smart, motivated science communicators. I went back to work all fired up and determined to expand the scope of the AGU blogs project (until then we had only blogged during one scientific meeting) and specifically, to launch my new blog on science communication. I’m already counting the days until ScienceOnline2011!
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Christie Wilcox, my newest SciBling here (three blogs to the left, then around the corner) at Observations of a Nerd to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Where I’m coming from geographically… That’s a long story. I always love getting asked where I’m from, because it’s such a fun answer to give. Since I always get asked this after the spiel I’m about to give, no, my family wasn’t in the military – they just liked to move a lot. I was born in Boston, but my parents moved to Hawaii when I was too young to remember. Then they divorced a handful of years later, and my mom took me and my brother with her when she moved to Vermont. I spent much of my childhood bouncing back and forth, my winters in New England, and my summers in Hawaii, until my dad moved to California and bounced around there. And then moved to England. And then back to California. I went to a boarding school in Massachusetts for high school, then Florida for my undergrad, and now I’ve managed to wiggle my way back to Hawaii for my PhD. I spent about 5 years in each place so far, with a combined total of 14 different places to live (counting boarding school as only one, although the room and building changed every year, and not counting the 26 or so places my dad has moved to that I would visit). I even sound all over the place – I say “karaoke” with a Japanese accent, “Hawai’i” like a local, and “y’alls” with a Southern twang. To me, “home” is wherever I am at, and wherever the people I love are.
As for philosophically, l am first and foremost a biologist. I like to say that I’ve been a biologist my whole life, although it wasn’t official until I received my undergraduate degree in Marine Science from Eckerd College in 2007. When I was a kid, I loved whatever animals I could find. I can distinctly remember early-morning gecko hunts with my dad, where I would go out in the yard and turn over every object I was capable of to find geckos. I have a report from my school when I was five where the evaluator specifically mentions my affinity for opening geckos’ mouths to look at their tongues. Seriously. I can show it to you. I had hedgehogs for pets as a kid, because, you know, a dog and a cat weren’t odd enough to keep me entertained. Of course, I kinda forgot this along the way, and in high school I didn’t know what the heck I was supposed to do, so I did a little of everything. I directed a play, did an independent study in Hawaiian history, and took AP Physics. I really blame my physics teacher, Brian Giannino-Racine, for most of what I’ve become. He did the most blasphemous thing: he made science – and not just any science, but physics – seem like something fun and interesting to study. I liked his classes so much, I figured I could become a physicist, and, technically, that is what I started with when I got to Eckerd – a double major in Physics and Marine Science. It only took one advanced physics class to change my mind, but the passion for science in general that he brought out in me remained.
Although “biologist” sounds good, the truth is that biology is a huge field filled with a million different lines of work. As my time as an undergrad came to a close, I still hadn’t really found my niche. I felt like I had to pick something – behavioral biologist, molecular biologist, etc, and I had no idea what I wanted to pick. Instead of applying to grad schools right away, and committing myself for five or more years to a project I was unsure of, I took a couple years to think about my options while working as a biochemist in a research lab in Florida. Finally, I came to the conclusion that a five year old me would have found obvious, which is that I should do whatever I like to do most, and so I ended up where I am now, in Hawaii pursuing my PhD (which though on paper is in “Cell and Molecular Biology,” is really in “Playing with Ocean Creatures”). As a career, I am forced to do the kinds of things that most people spend lots of money to be able to do. I have to live in paradise, and must dive all the time as a part of my job. I am forced to travel all over the Pacific to help others in sample collection, to places like the Marquesas, Kiribati and American Samoa. I even might have to go to conferences in places like Thailand and South Africa to present my work to others. Isn’t being a biologist absolutely dreadful?

After biologist in my self-descriptive terms comes writer. I love to write. I’ve always liked writing – I was that weird kid that everyone hated because I actually enjoyed essays in school. I wrote all the time, whether for school or just for myself. I used to think I would publish a book about my life someday. Actually, I still think that, but now for different reasons. Anyhow, I blog because I love to write, and by the time I graduated from Eckerd I had stopped doing a lot of that. I only wrote what I had to, and I had forgotten my love for it. When my friend Allie told me she had to write a blog for a class she was taking, I thought, damn, that’s a good idea. And thus Observations of a Nerd was born. I wanted a place where I could write about what I loved, and maybe some other people would like to hear about it, too. Logically, most of what I write about it biological in nature, but I get sidetracked every once in awhile. My writing career is in its infancy compared to my “real” one, but I love them both. Now, if only I could find the time to do them both as well as live a normal life…
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I think everything I do is interesting, but others might disagree. Along the way I have done a number of internships and volunteering that have given me a unique set of experiences. In retrospect, I remember them by the animals they brought me in contact with. For example, I learned that spotted eagle rays feel like puppies when they gently nibble shrimp off your hands, thanks to volunteer work I did at the Florida Aquarium. Cownose rays, on the other hand, feel like sand-papery vacuum cleaners. I worked an entire summer in Mote Marine Laboratory’s sea turtle program, where I walked up and down the beaches of Sarasota, flagging, protecting, and even moving turtle nests. During that time, I got to hold and care for at least fifty baby sea turtles, who are, officially, the cutest things that nature has ever produced (sorry, baby fennec foxes). Let’s see, what else have I done… Oo! I once helped electrically ejaculate an anesthetized river otter. That’s always the best story. People make the funniest faces when I talk about that.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Currently, I’m working on my PhD. I want to study lionfish. They’re a nasty invasive species in the Caribbean, yet here in Hawaii, one of the many places in the Indo-Pacific where they are native to, they’re almost impossible to find. No one really knows anything about the entire group of these animals. My goals are to understand a bit about the evolution of the group as a whole and, more specifically, their populations here to determine if their distribution patterns can give us any insights in the Atlantic. Furthermore, I want to study their venom, learn what it contains and how it works, and maybe give people some incentive to fish them in their invasive habitats. Mostly, though, I think I just want to spend a lot of time underwater looking for the buggers.
Ultimately, my goals are to get that PhD, and with it go on to some post-docs, and eventually, settle in somewhere as a researcher or a researcher/professor. The details are still fuzzy, but somewhere along the lines I’ll end up with a family and publishing a book or two. Hey – I’m only 24! I’ve got a lot of time left to figure out the particulars 🙂
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Blogging is something I do for fun. I find little tid bits of science interesting, and being the ever-talkative extrovert that I am, I want to tell other people about them. If you have met me in person, my blog makes perfect sense. Reading a blog post if mine is what it is like to spend 15 minutes having a conversation with me about something I’m passionate about (including it being mostly me talking. I talk a lot. And fast.), although the blog post is probably a little more grammatically correct. I love to share what I care about with others. That’s why I worked on the education and public outreach side of many of my science endeavors. Blogging is my way of doing that when I don’t have the time to volunteer for five hours a day in an aquarium or a zoo. I think everyone would find science cool if only more people would explain it better, which is something, I think, that I can do.
As far as other outlets go, I have to confess: I’ve become somewhat of an addict to social networking. They’re great ways to pass information around. I do it all now – Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. I get a lot of news and ideas for my blogging from the world of social networking I have created around myself. As for whether that’s a good thing… you’ll have to get a trained psychologist to answer that one.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs back in 2008 when I started blogging. Last time I counted, I follow 80+ science blogs on my Google Reader… so I like a lot of them! Some of my personal favorite writers include Brian Switek, Scicurious, those crazy Deep Sea folks Kevin, Craig and Miriam, the other ocean trio Andrew, Amy and David, and of course, Allie, since she’s the one to blame for getting me into this whole thing. But I have to give special note to Ed Yong and his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His was one of the first blogs I began reading, and I see NERS as a kind of model to strive for (with my own flare, of course). I was honored to even be considered for two of the Research Blogging Awards that he ended up winning – the idea that he and I might have anything in common is, to me, a huge, probably underserved, compliment.
Oh. And there’s also that silly Bora guy, of course. Though, I think anyone reading this already knows who he is!
I found a number of new blogs to read through the conference – like the kids from the Extreme Biology Blog. They simply blew my mind this year. I wish I’d have been that smart and driven at that age… I can’t even imagine where I’d be now!
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The best part, for me, was meeting all the people I only knew by name or pseudonym. There’s something about putting a face or a voice to the words you read that makes them seem even better. Meeting all of the people I admire and read was a treat, and getting to know new people I’d never even heard of was icing on the cake.
I think what I took with me from the conference wasn’t as much a specific quote or idea as it was… dedication. I blog for fun, as anyone who blogs should, but I also blog to say something that I think is important, and the conference really instilled in me a sense of urgency to write these things that I think matter in a way that matters. It’s as if the conference pushed me from being just a blogger to being a writer and a journalist, too. I feel like it’s more than just for me now. It’s for everyone who reads Observations of a Nerd, or follows me on twitter. It’s for a larger community of science writers and educators. And because of that, I am continually trying to improve what I do, whether that means live tweeting a tsunami, explaining something complicated in a better way, or finding a creature that is atypically cute to draw attention to an animal that others might not think to care about. Science Online 2010 revitalized my passion for all of it! I can only hope I can make it out again next year, and every year after that.
As far as suggestions go, make it longer! I want more time with more people! I didn’t even meet half the people that went, and I really would have liked to get to know everyone better and learn more about their projects, ideas and what they do.
It was so nice to finally meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Aloha,
Christie

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Jonathan Eisen of Tree Of Life blog (and Academic Editor in Chief of PLoS Biology) to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I am an evolutionary biologist interested in how organisms invent new functions. In particular I am interested in what causes differences in this “evolvability” between organisms. Or, in other words, the evolution of evolvability. I study this mostly in microbes, because, well, microbes rock.
I was born in Boston, MA and grew up in Bethesda, MD.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
In terms of background – I have always been interest in microbes and their evolution. Though I do not remember, I even wrote an essay on this in 9th grade.
In college (Harvard) I was originally an East Asian Studies major but switched to Biology after coming to my senses. I worked in multiple labs as an undergrad, first studying hummingbird circadian rhythms, then plant physiological ecology, and then found my true calling by working in a lab studying deep sea organisms and the microbial symbionts that live inside of them. I liked it so much I worked in the lab after graduating.
I then went to grad school at Stanford, originally to work on butterfly evolution, but then came to my senses and switched to working on how microbes protect their genomes from mutations (and in particular, why the mutation rates and patterns varied within and between species).
After getting that PhD thing I moved to The Institute for Genomic Research, where I was for eight years, and there I worked on sequencing microbial genomes and also on developing computational methods to study the evolution of microbes via analysis of their genome sequences.
Finally, I moved to where I am now – UC Davis. I moved here b/c of many things: (1) they have one of the best evolution and ecology departments in the country (2) my wife is from Berkeley and Davis, (3) we wanted to be closer to family in N. California (4) I like small towns that are obsessed with cycling (like Davis).
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
(1) I want to create a full and complete field guide to microbes.
(2) I want all the worlds scientific publications to be free (really free, not just at no cost – free as in freedom, that is)
(3) I live for my kids, Analia (5) and Andres (3).
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I think the most interesting and important thing is accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and education through the use of a combination of tools (web included) as well as opening up the restrictions that have been historically placed on knowledge (e.g., fees for access).
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
All these have been very important in communicating with the broader world. I view all of these things as tools to experiment with. None are good or bad in and of themselves but all can be used to communicate science.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
Not sure when I discovered them. I think when I went to SciFoo camp years ago I really became aware of the potential value of blogging. My favorites come and go. I try to sample from lots of different ones and not read the same ones over and over. Just like with scientific journals and scientific papers, some are good, some are bad but most are a mix, with bad and good and everything in between. So I like to look around at different ones, more by topic than by author.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Well, I already blogged about this here (tongue in cheek post about what was bad at the meeting – this is really about what was good in case you can’t tell )
And I also wrote about what I learned at the meeting here.
The meeting was great, hands down.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Misha Angrist from Duke (and the blog GenomeBoy), the fourth person in the Personal Genome Project whose entire genome was sequenced (thus one of the first 20 humans with a sequenced genome), to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. I bleed black and gold (though I wish the Steelers’ current quarterback weren’t such an asshat).
At some point after undergrad in the 1980s I decided I should be a genetic counselor. By the time I had the master’s degree and was getting ready to take my boards I realized I was not the guy who should be telling distraught people that their babies had serious problems.
The fortuitous thing was that my master’s thesis research took me to Duke and I had a wonderful few months working in a lab doing human genetics. In fact, I had so much fun I decided to get a PhD, which I finished in 1996. I hung around for a postdoc and overstayed my welcome. I realized that to succeed as a human geneticist (or genomicist) I would have to become a computational biologist, a statistical geneticist or a biochemist. I was not up to any of those tasks. (Are you sensing a pattern here?)
I wandered in the desert for a while. I dabbled in market research and biotech finance, where I succeeded in losing a small fortune in a short period of time. While I was bouncing from one epic fail to another, I managed to get an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, which was wonderful on many levels.
This led me back to Duke where I took a job as a science editor. Eventually, when it became clear I was doing the work of a faculty member, I became an Assistant Professor. I can say without a single iota of snarkiness or insincerity that I feel extremely blessed to be where I am today.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
My book, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics, will be published in November by Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. I am in the middle of editing it and trying to figure out how I can help make it successful.
Meanwhile, I am teaching science writing, genome policy stuff, and developing and writing grants and papers related to personal genomics, i.e., living the life of an academic.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I don’t know that I can offer a single answer. Certainly, at or near the top of the list is the kind of health-related stuff Thomas Goetz discusses in his terrific book, The Decision Tree. But what we’re living through is much bigger than science. I think the fact that citizens are now able to cut out the middleman, for better or worse (I tend to think it’s more often for the better), is really what fascinates me the most. This applies to all kinds of things. So, for example, I can buy a car on eBay and have it delivered to my house. I can text money to Haiti instantaneously. I can listen to On The Media while I walk my dog, I can send my parents pictures of their grandkids during their piano recital. I can order a genome scan online and see what it might mean for free at SNPedia. If I get really bummed out, I can watch Keyboard Cat for a few minutes. And thanks to people like you, I can read PLoS One and other journals for free and see what folks are saying about the latest and greatest (or not) in science.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I wish I knew. I think I can safely say that I will never be among the hallowed SEED science bloggers. The only way that would happen would be if they started handing out awards for infrequent and irrelevant posts. Sometimes I feel guilty about my desultory approach.
That said, Lizzie Skurnick, a fantastic writer who introduced me to blogging lo these many years ago, gave me simple advice that has served me well: blog about what interests you, about whatever your passions. For me, an ADHD kinda guy, this might mean discussing whether pharmacogenetic testing for anticoagulant response is ready for primetime, or posting a YouTube of Prince playing the bejeezus out of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
As for frequency, it’s kind of a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do thing. I am a beneficiary of people like you, who compulsively update their blogs. My life would be poorer if not for regular updates from Genetic Future, Genomics Law Report, and a dozen others. But GenomeBoy.com will never compete with those folks. For me, blogging often feels like a luxury I can’t afford or homework I can’t finish.
I’ve only been tweeting for a month and I have to say, it makes me crazy sometimes and I’m already crazy. I expect to be on Facebook soon, though I’m kind of dreading it. FriendFeed? I don’t even know what that is.
When and how did you first discover science blogs?
I can’t remember how I discovered them – it might have been via Jason Bobe and The Personal Genome (which he rarely updates anymore, sadly). It didn’t happen overnight, but at some point it became clear to me that whatever one was interested in, there were blogs out there catering to those interests. I’ve spent much of my adult life doing and thinking about genetics and genomics and their implications, so I gravitate toward blogs that engage with those subjects: Genetic Future, Genomics Law Report, Gene Sherpas, Eye on DNA, The Genetic Genealogist, The Spittoon, DNA Direct Talk etc. But of course there are other great ones: Culture Dish, Terra Sigillata, John Hawks. I’m forgetting a bunch.
Two blogs I discovered specifically via ScienceOnline were Adventures in Ethics and Science and Neuron Culture. Janet Stemwedel and David Dobbs are two of the more thoughtful and compelling writers in the blogosphere.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I thought 2010 was the best year yet! I think part of it is the natural evolution of the medium. Only a few years ago, to say you were a blogger, let alone that you were going to hang out with 150 other bloggers for the weekend, was to invite a blank stare, suspicion or ridicule. And I admit that I was skeptical about that first conference. I didn’t realize that so many people cared so much.
This year was extraordinary. The sessions on blog-to-book, fact-checking and rebooting science journalism were outstanding. Partly because they were applicable to my professional life, partly because they transcended blogging and got to the heart of perennial issues in science communication, and partly because the people involved – David Dobbs, Rebecca Skloot, Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, Tom Levenson, Brian Switek, Sheril Kirshenbaum – were so bright, charming and wise. I wish every meeting I went to was so fulfilling and I only spent two abbreviated days there.
I also had the pleasure of meeting Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature, whose book, Jacob’s Ladder, is that rare combination of history, science and culture, and was ahead of its time.
My only suggestion: is there any way the conference could be pushed back to February? I always want my Duke students to attend, but this year ScienceOnline took place before the end of drop and add, so logistically it was a bit more difficult.
It was great to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you will be able to attend again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Ed Yong from Not Exactly Rocket Science to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m Ed, I talk to people about science and I do it in three main ways. I write a science blog called Not Exactly Rocket Science, I do a fair bit of freelance journalism for British press, and I work in a science communications role for a big UK cancer charity. Round about the time that swine flu was saturating the headlines, I started calling myself a triple-reassortant science writer, which is a seriously geeky affectation but worth it for the occasional person who gets it and sniggers.
In terms of my background, I did a degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, covering all sorts of fields from animal behaviour to experimental psychology. I assumed that research was going to be my calling and I spent a year or so as a PhD student before realising that I was apocalyptically bad at it. Mythically bad. People composed ballads about how much I sucked. If I didn’t destroy the world during my time in the lab, it’s only because that would probably have counted as a publishable result.
Thankfully, the insight that I sucked at doing science coincided nicely with the revelation that I wasn’t too bad at talking about it. Essentially, I can’t narrow my attentional spotlight on a single subject; I need broad vistas. I can’t derive motivation from rare but transcendental moments of success amid a long drought of failure; I need a more regular fix. And my hands are clumsy and inept when handling a Gilson; they’re much better at dancing on a keyboard. And thus concludes my origin story. Maybe I should have just lied and said something about being bitten by a radioactive David Attenborough.
Moving on to here and now, I’m constantly excited by the new discoveries that I read about and I’m keen to infect other people with the same enthusiasm. I just think that people will be better off if they have a deeper understanding of the world around them and if they’re motivated to sceptically seek out that knowledge in the first place. Telling awe-inspiring stories about science is one way of achieving both those ends. My own love for science was fuelled by masterful communicators and I want to carry on that tradition.
Oh, and I live in London, a great, beautiful, cosmopolitan, culturally vibrant city that has the god-awful problem of being full of Londoners.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
At the moment, I’m essentially juggling two careers, one during the day and one at night. Like Batman but with more repetitive strain injury. During the day, I work at Cancer Research UK and carry the marvellously high-falutin’ job title of Head of Health Evidence and Information. My job is to ensure that our information on cancer prevention and early detection is evidence-based and to use that evidence to guide the rest of the charity. It’s a great mix of leading a small team, media interviews, reviewing literature, acting as a sort of consultant to other teams, and a fair bit of writing.
At night, I put on my journalist and blogger hats (they’re figurative hats, although if they were real, the journalist one would be one of those old fedoras with a Press pass sticking out of it, and the blogger one would be something silly but combative, like a conquistador helmet). I started blogging because I wanted to flex my writing muscles on different topics and in a style that’s more naturally mine. I also had visions of being a ‘proper’ science writer but wasn’t getting any traction sending pitches into mainstream media. So, I started doing it myself. I started on WordPress and was recruited to ScienceBlogs just over two years ago. The blog has gone from strength to strength and the last couple of months have been record-breakers in terms of traffic. This week has been the most rewarding yet. I won the top prize at the Research Blogging Awards as well as prizes for best post and best lay-level blog. And I’ve just begun Phase Three of the NERS life cycle by jumping into a new host body at Discover Blogs, where I’m tremendously excited to be joining a small but elite group of bloggers.
I also do a fair bit of freelancing – some news pieces in the past but mostly features at the moment. I’ve written for New Scientist, the Times, the Guardian, Nature and a number of other publications. And I’ve won a couple of writing awards too, including the Daily Telegraph Science Writer Award that really kick-started all of this off, and the Association of British Science Writers’ Best Newcomer award last year. Actually, the certificate for that says Ed Young, but I distinctly remember collecting it and shaking someone’s hand.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
The big goals are these: constantly learn new things and better myself. Be good at what I choose to do but never become arrogant. Be an excellent husband, a good writer and not an idiot, in that order.
To elaborate, the lofty goal is to get as many people interested in science as possible. Make the complicated seem simple, the obscure seem fun and the unknown seem tangible. My writing career is still in its infancy and I have no illusions about how far I have to learn. NERS is still the single piece of work that I am proudest of and I want to build it into a widely respected source of science news. It’s starting to get some mainstream recognition. That’s obviously personally fulfilling but I think that as part of a general trend, it would be prudent for both blogs and mainstream media to starting collaborating more. I want to continue to work for a good cause during my day job, keep on doing longer features for mainstream media and speak at more events. And at some point in the next 5 years, I would love to start writing popular science books. The problem is that I can’t think of a plan that involves me achieving all of these things without violating at least a few laws of physics. For the moment, I appear to have achieved time saturation.
I’m also keen to carry on absorbing ideas. The worlds of journalism, the Internet and, indeed, science itself are changing at a dizzying pace and it can feel like a massive treadmill, where we’re all running faster to stay in the same place like Caroll’s Red Queen. In the last year alone, my thoughts on journalism have changed significantly just through thinking about the field, reading commentaries from others and chatting to my peers. And all the while, I see people who have dug their heels in, stagnated in their opinions, and are slowly drifting back down the treadmill towards some extinction horizon. I would very much like to not be those people. The minute I think I’ve got this all figured out is the minute I really haven’t. So… more reading, mulling and discussing.
Other than that, I don’t really believe in detailed life plans. The most exciting things I’ve done over the past few years have come about through unpredictable openings and I think that successful people are the ones with the nous to capitalise on the right opportunities as they come along. With the gift of hindsight, even chaotic bumbling can look like some sort of structured plan.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
As far as science communication goes, there are two things that I love above all else. The first is finding a way of successfully explaining something complicated. Getting the right angle, metaphor or play on words is just magical. It’s like scoring a winning goal or finally getting an experiment to work or reaching the peak of a mountain, except I get to do it… every… single… day. The second is related – finding a narrative that links an entire field, or several different fields. This is why I write features. It’s an entirely different skill to writing posts based on single papers. It often involves drawing out massive spider diagrams and finding an easy route between all the nodes. And again, that moment when everything clicks into place, when you know how every paragraph will flow into every other, and when you can see the story beats… it’s just transcendental.
As far as the internet goes, I’ve written about this extensively on my own blog. I’m fascinated by the way that the internet is changing the face of science journalism, how it’s altering the very definition of a science journalist, how it can be used to reach mass audiences while simultaneously failing to do so, and the massive, incalculable implications of opening the tools of production to everyone. Simply put, I would not have this career without the Internet. I absolutely love the fact that a complete nobody like me can waltz in and start writing, and a couple of years later, I’ve spoken at an international conference, I’ve been published in most of the British press that I love and I’ve interviewed David Attenborough, my childhood hero, in his living room. I could kiss the Internet, but I know where it’s been.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I’ve already spoken about the blogging. My Twitter experience is about a year old and it has been an unexpected joy. There are obvious benefits – it’s great for publicity, getting more traffic, building a brand, chatting to like-minded people and so on. It also allows me to do things that I try to limit on my blog, like promoting other people’s stuff, linking heavily, being a bit sillier, chatting to friends, pointing out stupid stuff in the popular press, linking to geekery, and so on. I want to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high on the blog but it’s a different sort of signal on Twitter. For better or worse, my Twitter stream is probably closer to my actual personality than my blog is.
Twitter is also an absolutely amazing source of information. Tweetdeck is essentially my own personal newspaper that’s edited by the people I follow – a cadre of excellent journalists, scientists and friends who I trust to feed me interesting content. The thing that critics of the internet don’t get is that you can filter your way out of the noise with relative ease. It’s much like flesh-and-blood life – you get the most out of your conversations if you choose interesting people to hang around.
As a science writer, it’s invaluable too. I’ve used Twitter to source contacts for articles, clarify complex terms, get papers I don’t have access to and even commission a guest post on my blog. One of my followers even helped me to kill a pesky virus on my computer! I even think that Twitter makes quite good practice for a writer. People slate the 140-character format but I think it’s actually fairly demanding as a discipline. You have to work harder to be understood in a limited space, especially if you’re debating with someone. On the downside, there are the obvious negatives – it’s a massive time-suck and I personally find it very addictive. But there’s no question in my mind that it’s a net-positive thing.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I probably started writing a science blog before I started reading them. I devote most of my free time to writing and I get far too little time to read what everyone else is doing than I would like. I use Twitter to find stuff that interests me and there are only a few blogs that I follow religiously. To be honest, I’m far more interested in individuals as writers rather than in blogs as entities. Given that there’s so much cross-pollination between blogs, mainstream media and other formats, it makes little sense to me to focus on blogs just because I write one. I love good science writing, regardless of the format. And one of the interesting things about social media is that a person’s entire (I shudder to say it) brand affects how I view them – it’s about writing skill, but also whether they’re fun to chat to, whether they voice interesting opinions and whether they point towards interesting stuff.
In terms of people I rate, a list of science writojournobloggocommunicators would have to include Carl Zimmer, Vaughan Bell, Brian Switek, SciCurious, Jonah Lehrer, Brandon Keim, Alexis Madrigal, Matthew Herper, Mark Henderson, Ivan Oransky, Rebecca Skloot, David Dobbs, John Timmer, Adam Rutherford, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Brendan Maher, Christie Wilcox, Daniel Cressey, Jennifer Ouellette, Frank Swain, Simon Frantz, Martin Robbins, PalMD, Daniel Macarthur, etc. I’m also loving the opportunity to chat to loads of great up-and-coming science journalists on Twitter, like Ferris Jabr, Christine Ottery, Colin Schultz, Mike Orcutt, you obviously,… Look, I’m just scratching the surface here and I’m sure I’ve missed out people who I’ll feel awful about later. Have a look at my blogroll or the people I follow on Twitter. I do those for a reason.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
The social side of the conference was unquestionably the best aspect for me. There is something fascinating and unique about meeting old friends for the first time. I’ve known people like SciCurious, Brian Switek and others for years. They’ve done favours for me and I for them and after all this history builds up, you finally get to see someone’s face and give them a hug – it’s bizarre, but a little part of me wonders how people ever met other people in a different way. It’s a dream scenario for an introvert. There is also something quite remarkable about seeing all these people, who know each other through online social networks, cementing their relationships in flesh and blood. It simultaneously shows that social media can be a glorious conduit for meeting people, but it can’t substitute for a good, old-fashioned handshake.
As to the conference itself, without being too self-promotional, I was very pleased with the session that I ran with Carl, David and John. I absolutely loved the entertainment session with Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette and the pitching session with Rebecca Skloot, Clifton Wiens, David Dobbs and Ivan Oransky, a session I wish I’d come to several years ago. In general, I was inspired by how humble and down-to-earth everyone I met was. To some extent, this was probably confirmation bias but none of the journalists or scientists I spoke to had any airs, regardless of their experience or existing kudos. From experience, this is an outlier as far as such meetings go, but one I’m grateful for.
The thing that inspired me most in terms of my career was seeing how many people are immersed in a multitude of different roles and activities. They blog, write for mainstream media, make podcasts, shoot videos, teach… the list goes on. It’s an intriguing model and one that I will be paying close attention to. And the conference was largely about the opportunity for inspiring myself too. Agreeing to chair a panel gave me a chance to think hard about science journalism, its future and my place in it. It led to a couple of op/eds on my blog and a chance to test and develop my views on the field. More practically, it made me start thinking more carefully about interviewing other sources for the posts I write, and it led to the new Not Exactly Pocket Science feature on the blog. It has galvanised me into trying to make NERS the best possible home of science journalism that it can be.
As to next year, I think everyone should agree beforehand that if anyone gets ill, they immediately give their snotty tissues to Jonathan Eisen for phylogenetic comparison. That way, we can easily establish who Patient Zero was and we can dispel the scandalous rumours that it was me. Also given the number of sessions she ran this year, you might consider renaming the conference to SklootOnline 2011.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
This interview was cross-posted on Ed Yong’s blog so check out what kinds of comments he gets there.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Dennis Meredith to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m originally from Texas, but my jobs have taken me all around the country. I’ve always been fascinated by science and received my B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Texas. However, I discovered my true calling when I went into the science writing program at the University of Wisconsin, where I received an M.S. in Biochemistry-Science Writing.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
From the UW science writing program, I got my first job in the UW Medical Center News Office as assistant director. After that, I took science writing jobs at the University of Rhode Island, MIT, Caltech, Cornell, and ended up at Duke as the Director of the Office of Research Communication. I was known as the DORC of Duke. Always pay attention to the acronym before you take the job! My most interesting project was the research news site EurekAlert!, which I conceived and helped AAAS develop. It now links more than 4,500 journalists to news from 800 subscribing research institutions.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
I “retired” from Duke three years ago. I put the word in quotes because I’m still doing full-time science writing and consulting. My biggest project now by far is promoting my book “Explaining Research“, published by Oxford University Press. And of course, there’s my blog, Research Explainer. My central goal is really to change the culture of science and engineering to value lay-level communications more. By giving scientists and engineers the communication tools and techniques they need–from news releases to video to blogging–I hope to increase their engagement with the public and their influence in such critical areas as global warming and science education.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
What fascinates me is the Web’s immense power to make each person a media outlet. What’s more, the stunning increase in power and lowered cost of media technologies such as video cameras means that everybody can be a print/radio/TV outlet. The challenge for me is helping some of the people who have the most important things to say–scientists and engineers–take advantage of these technologies.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
I’ll admit some timidity when I started blogging. Even though I’ve been writing science for more than four decades, the idea of hitting a button and having my words instantly published was daunting. I’d always been “protected” by being in a magazine or part of a university news operation. Since then, blogging has not only become easier, but I’ve realized that it is a central tool in updating and expanding on the book. Since all the book’s references are online, I can easily insert a blog post into the references that contains new information or points I didn’t think of when I was writing the book.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I first discovered science blogs when I started blogging. I was delighted with the vast range of voices out there. I can’t really say what some of my favorite blogs are. It’s like asking which do you like better, tacos, ice cream, chardonnay, or oysters? I get something out of all the blogs I read, and each time I discover a new one, I find a refreshing new voice and new ideas. For me, however, the prototypical blog has been Bora’s–not to suck up to my host for this Q&A. I was struck from the beginning by Bora’s ability to so effectively blend science and communication issues in a blog, and this eclecticism has broadened my view of what a blog can and should be–a broad-ranging exploration of interesting issues, whatever they are.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
By far the best aspect of each ScienceOnline conference has been walking into this electric atmosphere of creativity and getting a delightful, inspiring charge of energy and ideas. For ScienceOnline2010, the most productive sessions for me were those on blogging techniques, scientific visualization and video. For next year, I’d recommend a significant workshop on Web video techniques, in which participants are invited to bring their cameras, especially the pocket-sized ones, and create and edit videos. I’m now just beginning to learn how to make quality videos, and any coaching would help. What has surprised me as I’ve trained myself is how simple techniques of lighting, composition and audio can greatly improve videos.
It was so nice to see you again (as well as later at AAAS on our panel) and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Diana Gitig to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I live in White Plains, a suburb of New York. I have a Ph.D. in cell biology but was not particularly well suited to lab work. My thesis advisor suggested that writing might better play to my strengths. I had my first baby the week after I defended my thesis, and I have been writing on a freelance basis since then. I was pretty much doing the stay-at-home mom thing, writing when the babies were sleeping for my own mental stimulation and to try to keep my foot in the door. I am very grateful to the feminist movement (and my husband’s salary) because I always knew that my staying at home was a choice, not a given; any day I woke up and decided I wanted to get a job, I could try to do so. I very much enjoyed being home with my little ones, but I view it as just one chapter in my life, and it is ending now that my youngest went off to school in September. This precipitated a minor identity crisis: I really thought about how I perceive myself, and not just what do I want to do but who do I want to be? After much introspection I decided to try to be a full time freelance science writer.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
Somewhat ironically, I have fallen into this niche of writing about laboratory techniques – the very methods at which I did not excel in graduate school. My favorite assignments were reviewing science and science fiction books as a freelance editor at amazon, since I actually like reading more than I like writing, and a couple of articles I wrote for Science. I know it is not at all like having a Science paper, but it is somewhat thrilling to be published there just the same. Covering symposia at the New York Academy of Sciences was also fun, as I got to get out and meet interesting people but still do the bulk of the work on my own time.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
Honestly, efficient scheduling is a big challenge for me these days – I am very happy to have a number of assignments, but time management is a skill I have not used in a while and have to relearn. My goals are to keep busy and learn cool stuff. So far, so good.
Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Online activity is essential in what I do. I literally could not have this career and this life without it. I work with editors and interview scientists and entrepreneurs all over the world, and I cannot imagine doing so without the ability to send work back and forth instantly. Having access to papers at home is invaluable. The ability to work alone and at home can obviously have a downside too, but Twitter takes care of that by helping me feel connected.
Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I was really impressed by Ed Yong, so I read his stuff now. I enjoyed talking to Jonathan Eisen, so I look at his now too. And yours of course. I also made some contacts that have enabled me to contribute to some blog-like sites, which has been great.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you?
For sure the Mexican chocolate Locopops.
But in terms of content, I really, really loved Michael Specter’s address on Friday night. It totally resonated with me. He spoke about a lot of things I had been thinking about, but he verbalized them much more clearly than I had.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
You too! And in NY for the 140 conference!

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Ivan Oransky from Reuters Health and Embargo Watch to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I grew up in the New York suburbs. I earned a bachelor’s in biology, then trained as an MD, and got through a year of psychiatry residency before leaving medicine to be a full-time journalist. Along the way, I spent four summers and some other time working in basic science labs, studying the complement system and pediatric infectious diseases. Today, I’m the executive editor of Reuters Health, based in New York, where I live in the less and less appropriately named neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. My wife and I split time between there and western Massachusetts.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I left medicine in 1999, but I had been committing journalism since I set foot in the Harvard Crimson as a freshman in 1990. (Or perhaps more accurately, since I joined my high school paper in 1986.) I eventually edited the Crimson’s science and health coverage, and became executive editor. In medical school, I edited the medical student section of JAMA, and wrote for other outlets including the Baltimore Sun, The New Republic, and U.S. News and World Report. During my first year of residency, American Medical News was kind enough to give me a column, which a Yale dean made a point of saying embarrassed him in a letter to all of my clinical supervisors. Around that time, I also started a weekly column for The Forward, a weekly Jewish newspaper, called The Doctor. If there’s a health problem Jews don’t worry about, it’s news to me, so I had plenty of material. Between then and now I’ve written for a number of other publications, from The Boston Globe to Salon to Slate to the Wall Street Journal Online. I’ve also co-authored books including The Common Symptom Answer Guide.
My first full-time journalism job, starting in May 2000, was as editor in chief of Praxis Post, a webzine of medicine and culture. We had a great time and earned important recognition, including being named a finalist for the 2001 Online News Association Award for General Excellence, but soon sadly went the way of the dot-com boom. In 2002, I became web editorial director of The Scientist, and I was promoted to deputy editor of the magazine in 2004, overseeing web as well as print. We won a slew of awards while I was there, including the Magazine of the Year Award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. I left The Scientist in March 2008 to become managing editor of online at Scientific American, where we grew traffic by 50%. I left SciAm in June 2009 to take my current position as executive editor of Reuters Health.
Throughout my decade of editorial management, I’ve had the good fortune to have smarter and more talented people than me willing to be part of my staff. Learning from them, and working with them to implement our joint visions, has more than made up for the fact that I really don’t have the time to do much of my own writing anymore. I’ve also benefited from generous and brilliant mentors such as former JAMA editor-in-chief George Lundberg.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
My day job takes up most of my time, as well as my mental energy. It’s a challenging time to be in journalism, as A Blog Around The Clock readers know, so just keeping up — and improving — the high standards of Reuters Health, while experimenting with new journalistic forms, is a full-time job. But my work at Reuters goes hand-in-hand with my three other passions: the Association of Health Care Journalists, where I’m treasurer; New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program, where I’ve taught medical journalism for eight years and have served as faculty advisor to Scienceline for four; and my new blog, Embargo Watch.
My goal in all of that work is to help people commit better journalism. Some of those people are full-time journalists. Some may be training to become full-time journalists, and some may not be employed as journalists at all. But if they’re writing for me, a student of mine, an AHCJ member, or reading and commenting on my blog, to me they’re part of ensuring the future of journalistic ideals — independence, accountability, and accuracy, to name a few.
Then, of course, there are the New York Yankees, whose season is about to get started as I write this. Which means I’ll be on the subway up to my season tickets in the bleachers as often as possible…
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
Although I contributed to the news blogs at The Scientist and Scientific American, I’ve just started my first personal blog, Embargo Watch, whose tagline is “keeping an eye on how scientific information embargoes affect news coverage.” I’m an active Twitter and Facebook user. I’m not on Friendfeed at the moment. I am squarely in the necessity camp when it comes to this stuff. I learn something whenever our audience comments on, retweets, criticizes, or ignores what we’ve put out there. And the story tips — for Reuters Health as well as for Embargo Watch — are invaluable.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
ScienceOnline sessions are always great, of course, but for me the highlights of ScienceOnline2010 were, as always, the gathering of the best minds in science blogging, all of whom are available for passionate chats in the hallways and the bar. I’m not sure I can point to anything in particular, but rather to the whole experience, as spurring me to start Embargo Watch. Getting invited to guest blog by the wonderful Ed Yong, whom I met for the first time at ScienceOnline2010, was important inspiration, as was knowing I can count on the other people I met for support and guidance. This year, the cabal — and I use that term with love — of book authors I hung out with has also encouraged me to think about a book I want to write.
I look forward to ScienceOnline2011, 2012, and on and on. Having been to all four of them now, I can say confidently that they keep getting better. My one suggestion for 2011 and beyond is to pay attention to the potential pitfalls of ScienceOnline’s success. It’s already become a place a lot of people want to be, and its audience one that a lot of interests want to engage. That’s a good thing. But it also means that the participants need to think carefully about conflicts of interest, funding sources, and that sort of thing. An example: Carl Zimmer and I turned to one another during the last after-dinner Ignite Talk this year and wondered, at the same moment, whom the speaker’s clients were. I think the speaker was happy to tell us, but that was the sort of thing that should have been baked into a disclosure in his talk. Setting ground rules like that ahead of time will only help ScienceOnline grow and mature even more than it already has. But this isn’t a criticism — I’m just speaking from experience as someone who has been on the board of directors of a group that’s only turning 12 this year.
It was so nice to see you again – the fourth time! – and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Mary Gore from The Duke Medicine Office of News and Communications to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a science writer at Duke University Medical Center, which is a great vantage point over many fields of learning. I was a science major, biology at University of Virginia, who always wanted a career as a writer. So going to journalism grad school at the University of Missouri provided the professional direction I needed. Between colleges, I worked three years at National Geographic writing for their image collection and working for their children’s magazine, then called World. Since the journalism degree, I’ve had editorial jobs, and I also freelanced 11 years, before moving into academia.
Oooh! I loved ‘NG World’ when I was a kid – a family friend in the USA bought me a subscription and I read every issue many times through.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
I’m so fortunate to have landed at a Top 10 medical school where the scientists within the various schools are so collaborative and supportive of each other’s work, by and large. That makes for interesting work of all sorts. What become the biggest stories, for me as a science writer, aren’t always the most predictable topics: diet and sex, for instance. In the two years I have been at Duke, the biggest story (and one I still get emails about) was Bryan Cullen’s RNA findings involving the virus that causes cold sores. The popularity of that story – a very basic science finding – was because of the sheer numbers: nearly 90 percent of people get the darn things, and any hope for a cure – even in the future – is news.

I have worked as a medical writer most of my professional career, but as an 11-year freelancer I took on a lot of assignments. I even had scripts produced for a TV show (Divorce Court). Writing about divorce was a fictional activity back then – and now you can’t make this stuff up. It’s what we have to compete with.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
My time is mainly spent in publicizing basic or translational biomedical science. My passion is to do my part to make the world understand that science is more important than celebrity. I am not so starry-eyed as to think that science will catch celebrity in the headline-making arena – but I do hope to see more medical and biomedical science in more places where people get their news. I sincerely believe that informing the public as much as I – and as we – can about early and late-stage research is going to help save the planet. I have two kids, so it’s important to me to discuss the issues. Not that he went out of his way to be my Facebook friend, but there I can see he has a bit of the awareness I was hoping for.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I am always trying to learn better ways to reach the broadest audience with one story. It’s interesting to try different tactics with different stories. One week it may be science websites and blogs that pick up the story – in fact, that happens most weeks. In other conditions, it may be the mainstream media, but there nearly always has to be either a translational component or a dangerous disease/condition for which there may be a promising, though early, finding. Even great science stories disappear when there are predominant stories, like the Haiti Earthquake, health care reform near-passage, the presidential election. The growing number of outlets online is pleasing. But my question is: who can synthesize all of these stories and make sense of it? Which sites are really the best go-to sites? For example, where are we, really, in the fight against cancer? There are thousands of bits of information. It feels hard to keep up, to know the best places to go for each subject.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?
So far, I am not a blogger at all. I do read them – yours comes to my inbox, but it is one of the few I subscribe to, because of time constraints I feel. Now that so many MSM science writers are gone from their posts, I think blogs will be further enriched. Maybe I’ll subscribe to more. I think we all have inbox fatigue. I have helped Duke scientists write about their findings for Huffington Post, and that is something I am proud of, given the potential readership by influential readers of those blogs who may be looking for sound information. I think blogging science news is a net positive. People need to learn about scientific findings – reported with accuracy – in any way they can.
When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
I wasn’t much of a blog reader until I came to Duke two years ago, and, in a nicely old-fashioned way, was introduced to you at Anton Zuiker’s home. That is really old-school – getting a personal introduction to the blogger – and in fact, that is what happens at Science Online ’10 – isn’t it? We all can meet in person and share. I like Ed Yong’s approach, and Ars Technica, and I like Neurophilosophy. I have been reading Carl Zimmer, and not just for the animal sex posts — I read him before that. I like Rebecca Skloot, too, and XX Factor on Slate. Oh, and Sandra Tsing Loh, the Loh Down on Science (a radio show, not a blog).
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
It’s a very democratic meeting; the accessibility to all others, including the gracious speakers, is good.
The Journalism session was the standout for me – it hurt to realize that the information we give as PIOs is considered so specious to some other writers. Thank you for your recent defense of PIOs as a source of science writing. We each have a communication job to do. Mine is to publicize the works, large and small of the scientists at Duke in biomedical fields. But as a trained journalist and one who freelanced as a writer for 11 years before going into full-time work in academia, I do strive to provide accurate science stories, double-check statistics and other data, and include thoughtful quotes from the scientists. Maybe part of my personal mission is to get young people interested in science, too, with bright, encouraging, affirming quotes from those who are practicing.
It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you come again next January.