The Romance of Science

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

For 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 interview of field scientists and philosophers who report their work in spare, but captivating detail. The “SciFri” outing in Utah this past September at Eccles Theatre was vintage Flatow who positions himself as a lay scientist who asks obvious but informed questions and seeds the proceedings with quotidian humanity, and often humor.

One guest of Flatow’s at the Salt Lake event was Nalini Nadkarni, Professor in the U of U’s School of Biological Sciences. Nadkarni has been looking up into the tree canopies of rainforests for thirty-five years and asking “what’s goin’ 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 with whom you feel like you could have coffee, then wine and then go waterskiing 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 scholarships and other funding opportunities specifically for underrepresented populations. A new funding opportunity, NSF INCLUDES, aimed to explore innovative ways to broaden diversity beyond the previously tried approaches.

“I started with the idea of the self-identity switch we observed in prisoners exposed to our science lectures,” Nadkarni says. “Before someone can enter this tapestry of cool things you can do in science, and partake of the many opportunities for science training, you first have to say, ‘I see myself as a thread that could be knit into this tapestry of science.’”

Awarded an INCLUDES grant the same year she had helped found the STEM Ambassador Program, the tireless Nadkarni worked with three populations: post-release adult inmates, post-release juvenile inmates and refugee youth. She and her collaborators in the arts, the humanities, and in the community helped groups explore their identity and relationship to science through improvisational drama, storytelling, and participating in ecosystem restoration projects.

Improving diversity is improving science, Nadkarni says. “How do you approach a problem? How do you critically think about a problem? How do you think about solving a problem or coming up with a solution that other people haven’t? Diversity of ethnicity and socioeconomic status is just a manifestation of diverse ways of knowing. That’s what U.S. science needs to stay competitive in the global arena.”

Nadkarni reflects on academia’s attitude toward science communication in recent decades, and finds encouragement in new graduate students’ enthusiasm for outreach, increasingly supported by institutions such as NSF, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the University of Utah. “It’s this evolving fabric in that we in academia are beginning to understand the positive impacts of interweaving science with society and society with science.”

Both Flatow and Nadkarni know that science has a perpetual “cool factor,” indisputably appealing. Science satisfies our curiosity about the universe, observable and not-so-observable, and, of course, about life whether it’s developmental biology or chemistry; birds or brains; genomes or the geophysical. At minimum science is filled with wonder; at maximum, with Ira Flatow musing and Nadkarni talking about tree canopies in the tropics with unbridled enthusiasm, it can feel heroic.