OUTREACH
who positions himself as a lay scientist who asks obvious but informed questions and seeds the proceedings with quotidian humanity, and often humor.
Nalini Nadkarni answers a question from an inmate at the Utah State Prison in Draper after her lecture on forest ecology, January, 2015
The Romance
of Science Nalini Nadkarni Guest on
For Nalini Nadkarni research, teaching and outreach are one seamless whole, whether on public radio, in the tree tops of Costa Rica or in a prison
F
or many, the voice of WNYC’s Ira Flatow is the voice of science, much as Bill Nye the Science Guy was for years the average American child’s portal to the relevance and wonder of empirical science, and Carl Sagan was, earlier, its TV evangelist. So it was that when Flatow took the stage in Salt Lake City recently to record one of his “Science Friday” shows, it felt like being in a warm, familiar bath.
The Science Friday host deploys a model based on the interviews of field scientists and philosophers who report their work in spare, but captivating detail. The “SciFri” outing in Utah this past September at the Eccles Theatre was vintage Flatow
One guest of Flatow’s at the Salt Lake event was Nalini Nadkarni, Professor in the U of U’s School of Biological Sciences. Thirty-five years ago, Nadkarni started looking up into tree canopies of rain and cloudforests and asking “What’s going on up there?” She’s been exploring treetop biology ever since in the forests of Costa Rica where 28,000 species of plants and animals live and interact. Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), she discovered “canopy soil” 2–30 cm-deep stuff that resides on trunks and branches and acts as a shortcut in getting nutrients to the flowering tops of trees that support this arboreal soil. These plants collect water and create their own little ecosystem, she reported, painting a picture with the help of slides that made the audience gasp, and then applaud. Nadkarni is someone whom you feel like you could have coffee with, then wine and then go waterskiing with later. She’s spry, animated and, most importantly, approachable. She loves her work. That is clear, especially when she describes the jacket she’s wearing of green patterned leaves, the design of which she created from a photo of an endangered plant she’s studied. By wearing the jacket, she innovated “the possibility of using fashion to raise consciousness for forest conservation.” This elicited a guffaw, of course, from Flatow, whose admitted stereotype of ecologists was suddenly challenged. “I’d have to look at every industry to make sure,” he quipped, “but I think ecologists are the worst dressed.” (Not so fast, she rejoined.) A critical part of engaging the public in science is showing the application of one’s peer-reviewed research. For Nadkarni, that everyday world intersection starts with conserving forests. In 2003, she learned that florist suppliers were harvesting moss from the Pacific Northwest old-growth forests. This moss takes two to three decades to re-grow, clearly an unsustainable business or ecological model. She then partnered with inmates in a nearby state prison to learn how to “farm” mosses, which relieved collecting pressure on wild mosses while at the same time engaging a scientifically underserved public group. That project led her to provide monthly science lectures in state prisons by recruiting faculty and graduate students who shaped their lectures to suit the inmates and provided security checks and evaluation surveys to document impacts on the inmates and the scientists. In January 2016, with a $1.2 million grant from the NSF, Nadkarni and collaborators at Stanford University and the Pacific Science Center started the STEM Ambassador Program. This initiative helps scientists identify populations and venues impacted by their science—but who might not realize it or feel inclined towards science. Jeremy Morris, a graduate student in biology, studies biomechanics with U biology professor David Carrier and was a member of the first STEM Ambassador cohort of twenty researchers. Morris’s work concerns the evolution of the human hand, so he found an after-school boxing club and taught its members what he’d learned about the evolution of the human fist. The NSF shares Nadkarni’s view of public engagement. Many previous efforts to increase diversity in science provided
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