Category: Communicating science

2020: Identifying the next 20 years of need in In Vivo MR

Or using 2020 vision to visualize the future of Magnetic Resonance

Or Magnetic Resonance, from molecules to space science

Are you doing magnetic resonance research (MRI, MRS, EPR)? Are you keen on learning cool new stuff, brainstorming new ideas and networking with peers and leaders in the field?

Come to the Gordon Research Conference and Seminar this summer!

Gordon Research Conference on in vivo Magnetic Resonance: July 19-24 (open to all)

https://www.grc.org/in-vivo-magnetic-resonance-conference/2020/

Chair: Jeff F Dunn Vice Chair: Kim Butts Pauly

Gordon Research Seminar on in vivo Magnetic Resonance July 18-19 (trainees-students/pdocs) Chairs: Manushka Vaidya and Melissa Haskell

https://www.grc.org/in-vivo-magnetic-resonance-grs-conference/2020/

Why come?

This meeting has been very influential in the development of magnetic resonance. It is one of those small meetings, in a beautiful setting, where people can meet others in their field and where ideas flow. This is the 20th anniversary meeting. In recognition of this, the meeting will have a bit of a historical feeling as well as a goal of brainstorming the next 20 years. It will cover many aspects of MRI including hardware, sequences and processing. From the first meeting, chaired by Michael Smith, to the 2018 meeting, chaired by Dan Sodickson, this meeting on Magnetic Resonance has been ranked among the top Gordon Research Conference meetings.

If you go farther back, the current GRC evolved from the GRC on Magnetic Resonance in Biology and Medicine, which started in 1974. The last meeting, in 1998, was chaired by David Wemmer, had Alex Pines as a speaker, and MRI was a minor component.

As a special anniversary theme, we are asking speakers to think about major discoveries in their labs, and to wax profound about where thire field might go in the next 20 years.

What is a Gordon Conference?

My students have said that this is the best conference they have ever gone to. It is one of those small group meetings where ideas flow and friends are made. You will hear news from a range of MR fields—expanding your knowledge and contacts.

Gordon Conferences are a special genre. The Gordon organizes sites, and all the meeting logistics. The program is required to have time for discussion and there are no parallel sessions. Speakers are encouraged to include unpublished date. People often come and don’t present. They are there to learn what’s new and to discuss science with leaders and trainees. One of the unique things about the “Gordon” is that it is a closed meeting. You have to submit an application and obtain approval to register. There is no abstract book. Photographs are not allowed without specific permission. Thus everyone’s intellectual property is protected. This conference is aimed at learning what is happening at the forefront of field. People can, and do, discuss what is new in their lab—not just what is already published. It was the Gordon that hosted many of the early meetings where the idea of MRI was tossed around, and developed.

They GRC is about networking and discussions—and so there is plenty of time in the afternoon and evenings for getting to know other attendees. Our GRC is famous for a nice hill walk, swimming, and the famous soccer (football!) games. The GRC starts with dinner on Sunday, an evening session and meetings in the bar (a relaxing venue where you don’t have to have alcohol to have a good time).

Posters are encouraged so bring it on. These will be relaxed sessions where everyone will have time to meet people at the poster sessions.

What is the Gordon Seminar?

 This is a trainee only meeting. It runs from the day before the GRC starts, to the afternoon of the first day of the GRC. Most speakers and discussion leaders are trainees. Get to know your peers.

So—great science, cutting edge AND time to meet people—not just hear them while they blather on behind a podium.

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Hints for attending a Gordon Conference/Seminar:

Attendees and speakers are encouraged to stay for the duration so you have time to make friends and go away with new colleagues. There are many late night brainstorming sessions sitting on the lawn with the stars overhead (hope for no rain!). There are organized social events every day including the now famous Kearsarge hike with fantastic views of New England.

Bring walking shoes, a bathing suit for the freshwater lakes and whatever sport gear you might want. Take in organized activities such as canoeing. Partake of the famous “last night” Gordon dinner of lobster (have I mentioned that the food is fantastic and the bar is cheap).

To register follow the links above for the GRC and GRS. Remember that it is a two step process where you apply, obtain permission and then register. We are looking for funding to help people with registrations and note that there is a diversity funding link on the conference homepage.

We look forward to meeting you.

Yours in Magnetic Resonance

Jeff F. Dunn Chair GRC

Kim Butts Pauly Vice-Chair GRC

Manushka Vaidya Co-Chair GRS Melissa Haskell  Co-C

Communicating science—some ideas for newbies

I was asked by the international society of magnetic resonance in medicine to talk about twitter and blogging for science communication. Take home: Excite people with a story that is relevant to their experience, remove jargon (so much for including the jargony society name) and give the conclusion first! Here are some tips to get you started.

We are entering a new phase of science. In this new world, we are expected to make a more concerted effort to reach out and communicate with both scientists AND non-scientists. Why do this? How to do this?

Photo some @ismrm twits at #ismrm17     @jeffreyfdunn @Alex_leemans @badjiatef @silascribbles

I know blog is too short to answer all these questions but I hope to include enough to get you started. We scientists have isolated ourselves so much that the public don’t understand most of what we do. Many actually don’t trust scientists to be unbiased. You want to reach out but are a bit uncomfortable doing that. Many scientists don’t want to speak in public. The internet is designed for you. Twitter and blogging make it pretty simple.

Aim to excite, not to preach. Although we are tempted to explain why alternate facts are bad, leading by example will have more impact. If people get interested they will naturally learn. Keep blogs short, focused and backwards. By this I mean put the conclusions first and build the information as you go. Make it so one can read the first few lines and know what you are going to say.

Blogs can be useful to describe papers in layperson terms. You can use them to teach a subject. Research papers which are blogged about actually tend to have more citations. You might blog on a disease if you are working on that disease and target the public interest groups and patients. You might blog on how imaging works.

It is important to define your audience (demographic, etc). The style of writing and the subject should be consistent if you want to attract a particular group. Perhaps start with an anecdote about something that may relate specifically to your audience. Think of the elevator speech. Make a statement that will attract the person or group you are targeting. Try to understand your audience, whether a single person or a group. Who are you talking to? You would start a conversation differently if you are meeting your family, your research colleagues, a layperson who is sitting on a grant committee, a senior university administrator, etc etc. Have different opening lines or ideas for each audience regardless of whether you are sending a tweet or writing a blog.

How to blog can be a bit overwhelming. Ask another blogger. Blog software allows for creating categories so your blog might have different subjects with links to each subject.

https://www.aaas.org/pes/strategies-blogs

It will take a bit of research to create your first blog. You need a site. You can go full on and buy your own domain. I use “godaddy” to purchase my domain and have an online host. I use wordpress to design the site. Universities often have software that allows you to create and host a website on the university server for free. Lots of websites also have free blogging options—do a search on blog software sites. Using the university is great if you are focusing on your own work. If you decide to blog about personal or other science topics, you might want your own site so there are no control or IP issues.

Read blogs. Get ideas. It is a wonderful and glorious online community of people writing because they are excited and want to reach out to people like you.

Check these out:

Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Highlights

just an editorial note: the MRM link above works of you click ismrm but not if you click the share symbol on the right. I don’t know why JFD

http://scienceborealis.ca/

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/

 

So, TWITTER. Short. Snappy, and with a lot of potential. Here are a few tips:

If you don’t want to tweet yet—fine. It is the best online newspaper around. Use the search icon to search for keywords. Start following people, universities, interest groups, newspapers, journals, magnetic resonance etc. How about the organizers and some members of the scicomm panel: @mrm_highlights @jeffreyfdunn @stikov @erikaraven @fmrib_karla @mrimark @Dee_Kay_Jay

When using twitter to communicate science, it is OK to tweet a lunch photo and some travel pics now and then, this makes the person seem human. Make sure you are polite. Bad tweets can haunt you forever. Consider the audience (again). If you post a photo of a scientist, put something interesting in to say why someone might want to know about this person.

Put something in your bio that relates to the image you want to project in your twitter account. Put in a photo. You may not want one of yourself but put in something-an image, hardware, cartoon, you doing something that you like to do. The bio is short but without it you won’t get many followers. Why would someone follow you if they don’t know what you are going to tweet about?

-include a photo in your tweets when you can. People love images, pictures, etc.

-include weblinks. If you publish a new paper you could tweet the link to the paper or pubmed citation. Tweet your lab website. These links make twitter very powerful in terms of conveying news. The tweet then becomes just a title pointing to the longer article you want to communicate

-include hashtags. #MRI #ISMRM17 related to the topic. Think about what someone might search for. Most hastags in twitter are too long and not too searchable.

-include @etc. By including someones twitter handle, the tweet will show up in their software as a mention. They will see it and have a higher probability of retweeting or reading it.

In conclusion, more info:

Thoughts on using social media as a scientist:

http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/features/2014/02/scientists-guide-social-media

Thoughts on using twitter as a scientist:

http://www.americanscientist.org/blog/pub/the-benefits-of-twitter-for-scientists

AND, a peer reviewed article saying blogs will increase your publication readership! Enjoy cyberspace.

  1. Hoang, J. K., J. McCall, A. F. Dixon, R. T. Fitzgerald and F. Gaillard “Using Social Media to Share Your Radiology Research: How Effective Is a Blog Post?” J Am Coll Radiol 12(7): 760-5.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to compare the volume of individuals who viewed online versions of research articles in 2 peer-reviewed radiology journals and a radiology blog promoted by social media. METHODS: The authors performed a retrospective study comparing online analytic logs of research articles in the American Journal of Neuroradiology (AJNR) and the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR) and a blog posting on Radiopaedia.org from April 2013 to September 2014. All 3 articles addressed the topic of reporting incidental thyroid nodules detected on CT and MRI. The total page views for the research articles and the blog article were compared, and trends in page views were observed. Factors potentially affecting trends were an AJNR podcast and promotion of the blog article on the social media platforms Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter to followers of Radiopaedia.org in February 2014 and August 2014. RESULTS: The total numbers of page views during the study period were 2,421 for the AJNR article and 3,064 for the AJR article. The Radiopaedia.org blog received 32,675 page views, which was 13.6 and 10.7 times greater than AJNR and AJR page views, respectively, and 6.0 times greater than both journal articles combined. Months with activity above average for the blog and the AJNR article coincided with promotion by Radiopaedia.org on social media. CONCLUSIONS: Dissemination of scientific material on a radiology blog promoted on social media can substantially augment the reach of more traditional publication venues. Although peer-reviewed publication remains the most widely accepted measure of academic productivity, researchers in radiology should not ignore opportunities for increasing the impact of research findings via social media.

 

 

 

 

Act your Science: improvisation training at U Calgary

Dennis Cahill, Loose Moose Theatre: improvisation with science graduate students

Your talk is next. There are hundreds of people in the audience. Your heart is beating so loudly you wonder if the person beside you can hear it. What if you screw up? You can’t focus on the speaker even though you had wanted to hear her for years

Is this you before your talk—or before your thesis presentation, or a job interview? What if you could train to reduce that anxiety? What do actors do? These thoughts led me to create “Act your Science?” at the University of Calgary. Did it help? Read on!

I came across the idea of using improvisation training to improve science communication skills years ago through Youtube. Alan Alda, a well-known actor (including the “MASH” television series), applied his acting and improvisation training to help scientists improve their communication. He developed the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. You can see some information here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtdyA7SibG8

There is a testimonial from Boston University in this link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fwr3fNNLbY

I stored that info. After all, I did drama in high school—this could be fun and interesting.

My interest in scicomm led me to setting up such an improvisation course although the journey didn’t start with that goal. I took the Banff Science Communication course with amazing communicators like Jay Ingram, Mary Anne Moser, John Rennie and more. I was surprised to see that improvisation was  included. The next incentive for starting an improvisation course came after I joined the Canadian Science Writers Association (now now the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada). I met Janice Benthin, the Executive Director. She had been thinking about organizing improvisation with Calgary members and had made contact with Dennis Cahill—artistic director of the Loose Moose Theatre company in Calgary and one of Canada’s top improvisation trainers.

It began to feel like we had an idea that might be achievable.

Who would come, and how would we pay for it?

I wanted to do something special for graduate students in the area of STEM research at the University of Calgary. I approached the Graduate Students Association for funding through their “Quality Money” program and voila—we had funding. I approached the Faculty of Graduate studies for administrative help and ideas—and voila, we had rooms and a recruitment plan.

A month later, “Act your Science” was born. I was in a room at the University of Calgary together with 15 graduate students, Dennis, and a lot of uncertainty about whether this was going to work.

In short, we had an absolute blast. The main theme running through the course was the idea of learning to fail gracefully in front of an audience. Training with this in mind greatly reduced “presenter anxiety”. The group began very tentatively as expected. There were a lot of pauses and embarrassed looks to each other. By the end, people were jumping up from their seats to volunteer. The transition from not wanting to be in front of people, to knowing you can  have a good time even if you make a mistake, was complete. The comfort level with presenting, even in those where English is a second language, was much higher. In the final evaluations, everyone said that their ability to communicate was improved.

And, bonus, we learned even more. A second big theme was to “be in the moment”. We learned how to focus on the message, the story, and the others on stage—all while maintaining connection with the audience. We learned to trust that a story will unfold, even if it is not memorized. This lead to the presentations being much more relaxed and less forced. The presenters became communicators and not just scientists repeating memorized sentences. We learned to trust that if we walked up in front of an audience, we had the skills to engage without memorizing. During the first course, one of the “English as a second language” students attended a conference where they won the best podium presentation! Don’t just rely on my word. Here is a blog from Jennifer, one of the students.

http://www.sciencewriters.ca/4763301

So, success. And fun.

We played games and laughed. We bonded as a group, through shared embarrassment and success. We learned to steal each other’s hats, to speak in one voice, to think in the moment, to make connections with the audience and to be acutely aware of others. This was all done through games, many off which would sound a bit silly if I just described them.

The games gave us the practice and confidence to talk to an audience (not just AT the audience) and, when you forgot your line or idea, to fail gracefully. After all, isn’t worrying about those problems what makes you anxious before speaking to an audience.

Imagine not having that anxiety.

 

Should science communication societies like the Canadian Science Writers Association limit senior roles to journalists

Photo from a David DiSalvo article http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-scientists-and-journalists-dont-always-play-well-together/#42935dcf1dec
Photo from a David DiSalvo article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-scientists-and-journalists-dont-always-play-well-together/#42935dcf1dec

In Canada and the USA, the role of media based science journalists in societies focused on science communication vs. people who write about science (scientists, public information officers, bloggers) is currently under debate. Contrary to the idea that truth and integrity will suffer with an open door policy, I expect that impartiality and “truth” in science writing will be improved if non-journalists are allowed equal access to science communication organizations and societies.

Some background: I’m a Professor in the University of Calgary. My job is to create new knowledge and to teach (mostly graduate students). I need grants to do what I do. Given the shortage of funding in Canada, I spend a most of my time applying for grants to do my work.

For good reasons, there is a growing requirement to undertake “Knowledge Translation”. Agencies are encouraging scientists to take a more active role in communicating what they discover. KT in my field could be working with clinicians teaching them about new discoveries in MRI. It also includes reaching out to disease based societies and to the general public. Big research grants have been turned down when this KT portion is underdeveloped. KT is also a growing portion of my annual report. Not only do I list my papers and students, but also what activities I do that fall under a communication heading. Since I enjoy communicating, this isn’t a hardship. My biggest reason for committing my time though, is that regular people pay my bills—mostly through their taxes. We, as scientists, need to let people know what has been discovered and, equally importantly, what remains to be discovered. Why do science!

I’m excited being encouraged to reach out. I want people to share my excitement about discovery, and I hope that by doing so our society will become more engaged. OK, this is a tall order. I aim to engage one person at a time and I assure you, there have been wonderful moments when I’ve been able to change a response from “huh?” to “wow!”

I’ve been asked if I’m a science communicator. After replying with what I do, I’ve had both a “yes you are” and “no you aren’t”. I was puzzled. Surely if I communicate science, regardless of my job, I’m a communicator.

Ahem, this is sacrilege, according to some. Why?

Mainstream, or media journalists were the founders of many science communication societies. In the good old days, these people dominated the science communication environment, both in skill and in numbers.

Things are changing. Everyone with access to a computer and the internet can set up a blog site and do science communication. One notable communications group include those that make press releases for universities and other research organizations. It is the clear job of these people to make the discoveries sound amazing, groundbreaking, game changing and unique. Scientists themselves are doing more communication.

So, what is the problem? As well laid out by the President of the CWSA, Tim Lougheed, in an email to the CWSA membership, there is concern that some individuals, such as a public information officers (PIO), are not bound to the same high standards of academic journalism and so may mislead people with inappropriately positive press releases. I would add that scientists may also distort their own work for their own benefit. In addition, those with products to flog or agenda’s to support could actually lie about their findings.

If the CSWA allowed everyone who does science communication an equal role in the society, then, according to Tim Lougheed, members are concerned that “the CSWA would lose credibility as a touchstone of journalistic integrity.”

An important point was made by Tim–that the CSWA played a significant role in highlighting the muzzling of scientists by the last government. Only an independent journalist could have worked against that mandate. Unfortunately, this is not a clear reason to protect journalist roles in the society. I’m sorry to have to point out that I know journalists who would not speak out because they held federal grant funding in the area of science communication. What would have happened if they had been President of the CSWA during this period? I could also imagine a situation where a journalist works for a publication with an editorial view that could reduce the impartiality of the journalist. Just by having a journalist at the helm, does not ensure an unbiased or unfettered leader.

I agree with the problems. But I disagree with introducing protectionism. Be careful about labeling people within a group as universally having a lack of integrity. As a scientist looking at the field of science journalism, I am often appalled by the extent that media journalists will happily buy into the “groundbreaking” jargon, writing headlines and text that are clearly aimed at improving readership or being “click bait”. One has weak legs to stand on when describing media journalists, as a group, of having a higher level of integrity than any other science writing group.

For these reasons, I strongly disagree with limiting the role of members in the CSWA. I think the main argument is unfounded.

On top of that negative argument, I have a positive one. We need to work together and to learn from each other. People who are doing press releases for universities are often just rephrasing what the scientist themselves have written. The scientist, in turn, often sees the publicity as a good way of improving their annual report or the justification section of their next grant. All of us need to find a way to guide the general public to accurate and unbiased science based information.

If we put these communicators in the same room through chapter meetings, the annual conference, emails etc, and truly get to know the goals and limitations that each group has, then the results will certainly be better communication. If enough scientists and PIO’s hear the concerns of journalists, perhaps press releases will be more appropriately tempered. The scientist may learn better writing skills and the PIO’s may feel more empowered to obtain clarification from the scientist. Journalists will have more access to members in all aspects of science communication—which gives them more opportunity to find stories and to fact check. Working together will promote a common good.

Perhaps instead of targeting a group, the CSWA should focus on how the constitution and mandate of the society could be written to clarify the role of the society and its officers, to write in an obligation of impartiality and the option of abstention if an officer is restricted by pressure from their own work.

Also, the society president is elected by the society, which puts some limitation on the individual. Don’t make this a two tiered organization.

I only see benefits to inclusion. I, for one, look forward to working with the CSWA, and learning from media journalists, as my career evolves to include more science communication.

Let’s learn from each other instead of putting up artificial barriers based on emotionally driven perceptions of who has more integrity.