Archived Newsletters

Spotlights on Outreach and Engaging the Public of two APS Fellows FOEP Nominated

Questions and Answers with two FOEP nominated APS Fellows, Don Lincoln (2015) and Ágnes Mócsy (2016). Answers are edited for clarity as needed.

Don Lincoln (2015)
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

"For contributions to outreach and engaging the public in the physical sciences, particularly particle physics, with a broad range of communication vehicles and forums."

Q. You’ve been doing a lot of cool science. Which projects have you worked on that were the most exciting to you, and what made them exciting to you?
The first question is easiest to answer. I worked on a Fermilab experiment called E683 that shot the highest energy photon beam in the world. It probed the intersection between nuclear physics and the realm of quarks. After that, I first worked on the Fermilab experiment DZero and now the CERN experiment CMS. Those two were (and are) each in their time employed the highest energy particle beams in the world to try to find something new about rules that govern the universe.

For excitement, that’s much trickier. I loved E683 because I was able to work on every facet of the experiment, from building it, to writing the software, to analyzing the data, to writing the papers. It was the full experience. In the second two experiments, the experience is quite a bit different. It’s extremely hard to play leading roles in everything. The experiment is too big and the requirements on each component are simply too stringent. There, you make your contribution on a piece and collaboration is key. The DZero experiment cofound the top quark and the CMS experiment cofound the Higgs boson. It is a fantastic experience to be part of key discoveries.

Q. You’ve been involved in a tremendous number of outreach projects, for example: Blogs for the PBS show NOVA, two biweekly columns for Fermilab Today, videos for Fermilab, TED talks, Scientific American articles and others, writing books for the public and consulting on a number of books, as well as hundreds of public lectures. What motivates you to do all this? How do you manage to find time to do all this and your research?
It’s hard. But some people go bowling or others garden. I write. I think it’s important. And I have a patient family. Plus, as I have increased my national visibility, Fermilab has given me some freedom to spend my time helping to tell the public about the great science that particle physicists and cosmologists are doing.

I grew up in an academically-impoverished household. My dad never finished high school. My interest in science arose from a combination of science fiction writers, as well as the writings of Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, George Gamow, etc. I am paying a debt.

It seems to be working. I get emails from young people who thank me for telling them about a world they would have otherwise never imagined. I like to think that my parents (and Carl, Isaac, and George) would have been proud.

Q. Have you ever regretted doing outreach or felt that it has gotten in the way of your research?
I have never regretted doing outreach. Not once. But it has had consequences for my research career. When I was young, doing outreach was considered a career negative. Time spent talking about science wasn’t doing science and therefore was wasted. That attitude probably closed some paths that I might have followed, had I made other choices. But I have no regrets.

Q. From all your outreach projects, which type of outreach do you find most effective, and which type do you find most rewarding?
That’s a tough question. In physics, we tend to clump together education and outreach and, if we do either of them at all, most of us tend towards the education side. Education is a culture in which most physicists feel comfortable and the rules are hierarchical. The professor is the expert and the listeners are expected to exert themselves to learn. This is an important effort, but it is less demanding on the lecturer.

In outreach, the power structure is reversed. The consumers are in charge. If the producer isn’t engaging, the consumer will turn to something else.

My first guiding principle is to make scientifically-accurate and otherwise entertaining content. My second guiding principle is to never forget my audience. The audience varies for each thing I produce. The Scientific American audience is intelligent and inquisitive, but not necessarily physics-savvy. The Physics Teacher audience knows physics, but not always the most modern principles. The YouTube audience only wants a factoid or two that they can consume quickly. Always, always, remember your audience.

My final principle is to try to find ways to leverage the number of viewers. If you make a great talk, but deliver it to a room with three people in it, this is not the best use of your time. Accordingly, I try to engage the media, which is why I write for LiveScience, Space.com, CNN, and (rarely) The Huffington Post. They can put an article in front of tens of thousands or even millions of eyes. My YouTube videos get tens of thousands of views. My magazine articles can do very well. In Scientific American, they even translate the articles into two dozen languages.

Which do I find the most rewarding? That’s super hard. Talking to a couple of kids can make a huge impact on them. I can guide them in ways that can change their lives. And that is incredibly rewarding.

However, I think the thing that I like the best is to find ways to engage a large audience. If I can do that, then perhaps the viewers will take it upon themselves to do a little more reading. I have anecdotal evidence that this works. But I can always do more.

Q. What advice would you give to others doing outreach?
Outreach is personally rewarding, and it is crucial in our modern world. We live in a world in which facts are viewed as amorphous things and that the loudest voice is the right one. And that’s not true.

Without taking a stand on any of these topics, each of them have a single objective answer. The Earth is 13.7 billion years old, or it’s not. Mankind is genetically tied to the rest of the tree of life, or it isn’t. Humanity is changing the climate, or there are other causes. Cell phones don’t cause brain cancer, or they do.

If you decide to do outreach, my advice is to pick a type that interests you. It could be writing, public speaking, working with science festivals, doing a science café, mentoring kids, etc. Talk to people who are doing similar things and learn from them. But be sure to remember that you’re the one doing it, so don’t just clone what they did.

Also, remember that it takes time to build a voice. Don’t try outreach if you’re a sprinter and not a marathoner. Everything takes longer than you’d think.

You also have to keep in your mind your own career. Outreach is rewarding, but there is an uneasy tension between doing outreach and research. The research world is highly competitive and you will be jockeying with people for which that is their entire focus. Accordingly, I recommend that early in your career that you focus on the things that will move your career to a safe place. Once you get a permanent academic position and then tenure, you will be in a better position to rebalance your life. Of course, if you decide to do a lot of outreach in your graduate school or postdoctoral years, you may find that you like science communication better than research. You might then consider working for a museum or for a national science organization, like APS, ACS or others.

Q. Are there any parts of your outreach experiences that you think readers of our Spotlight article should know?
There is a tremendous advantage to “being in the club,” so to speak. It took me a year and a half to have anyone show interest in my first book. Now I can call many publishers and sell the book on the basis of a voice conversation. It took me five years to get on Scientific American’s radar screen. Now I can pitch an idea directly and get an answer in a day.

The more you do and the more visible you are, the easier it is to branch out and do other things.

Plus I can’t overemphasize the importance of connections and networking. My eventual entrée into the world of writing for Scientific American came through a connection between a mutual friend. Being on the NOVA television show arose because I was doing blog posts for NOVA online. My invitation to give talks on cruise ships came from connections with Scientific American and my ability to work with the Great Courses came from a recommendation from a faculty member I met on that cruise. People matter. Remember that. See how people you meet can help you and don’t forget to help others. Remember that we are all working to get the message out about the importance of science. The more people we have doing it, the better.

Ágnes Mócsy (2016)
Pratt Institute

"For innovative explorations of the intersection of science and the arts, for advocacy on behalf of fundamental science, and for promotion of underrepresented minorities working in science."

Q. You are a theoretical nuclear physicist and have worked on a number of exciting projects. Which physics projects have you worked on that were the most exciting to you, and what made them exciting to you?
There are a number of really exciting and memorable projects I took part in and research experiences I have lived through. It is great to have had the opportunity to spend a significant part of my life researching fundamental questions, such as the origins of matter - what happens when we heat up matter to trillions of degrees, recreating conditions present microseconds after the Big Bang? This, on its own, I find extremely exciting.

We think that the early universe was made of a soup of some of the most elementary constituents of matter, quarks and gluons, a soup we refer to as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). We recreate and study this matter by colliding heavy ions at nearly the speed of light! We do this in two terrestrial laboratories, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in NY, USA, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Studying for example how composite particles form from a cooling and expanding QGP is non-trivial. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, relevant in answering this question is not easy to solve, and requires approximating models and so-called effective field theories, as well as supercomputers.

One of the most exciting times in my career started with a talk I heard as a postdoc at a conference that raised in me a nagging question I immediately wanted to work on. The resulting research, done with a collaborator, lead to a shift in paradigm in the understanding of what was considered true at the time. Our theoretical work showed that our understanding of quarkonium suppression in relativistic heavy ion collisions, the so-called “golden signal” of QGP production, a thermometer of some sorts, is not only incomplete, but at places the interpretations of results are misleading. What made creating this body of work both exciting and nerve-wracking was that our results went against what famous well-established leading figures in the field were saying. I’ve spent lots of sleepless nights worrying about a potential mistake and thus cross-examining my calculations over and over again. Naturally, I wanted to be standing on as firm a ground as possible when going against the mainstream. Such times are the most exciting in science, when people really fight you and want to shred your work to pieces. If it withstands the scrutiny it means that you are making something truly new and your contribution will matter in moving our understanding a tiny bit further. This was undoubtedly intellectually exciting and pleasing.

Way before the quarkonium work, part of my PhD research was to investigate the phase diagram of QCD and make theoretical predictions for whether there is a critical point in the nuclear phase diagram, and if so where that is. It turned out that a decade after defending this thesis work, Brookhaven’s collider began a program looking for the critical point, trying to scan the phase diagram experimentally, and that program continues today. Although, due to other interests I stepped away from this exploration I am still excited that I was one of the early contributors to the phase diagram question, that has by now grown into its own field.

Determining the Sound of the Little Bangs was another super exciting project I have done with a collaborator. Based on experimental data and theoretical results we studied how density waves might propagate in the QGP, explaining some of the thus-far unexplained and unexpected measurements. This fluctuations-correlations analysis was another work where I feel we did something that mattered, something that could not be ignored, but allowed for more questions and investigations to be raised. This work also resulted in my first outreach project, since we created a YouTube video that culminated with the sound itself.

Q. You’ve been involved in a number of outreach projects, for example: Creating short films and videos, giving workshops, collaborating with artists and designers, inventing the Fusion Project Runway, holding science fashion shows, art shows, lobbying congress, talking to the underrepresented, young girls of all colors (also serving on the board of SistersMATR), being a part of PubSci events, producing Science Happy Hours, talking to a wide audience in theater and cinema, creating interdisciplinary science courses, like Science, the Film Muse, and so much more. What motivates you to do all this, and how do you manage to find time to do all this and your research?
My motivation for all this is rooted in encounters that shed light on the value of fundamental research. Its role in a society is not understood, or it is misunderstood, or misguided. I felt somewhat of a responsibility to share what my understanding is. I found that people are curious and they want to know and they want to understand, and it is our job as scientists not be condescending towards not knowing but rather to inform and raise curiosity. My conviction is that physics in not only for physicists. Many can enjoy the awesomeness of understanding something about how things work and why they are the way they are without having to go through years of math training. Even showing the beauty and power of math and that of equations causes me pleasure when it breaks down some of the walls built around the accessibility of physics.

There is also another, more personal motivation. Too often I was faced with a statement that I do not look like a physicist. Our society’s vision of a physicist (and often of any scientist) tends to be that of a middle aged white male. So this, together with the realization that I was often one of the few, if not the only female in a seminar room, ignited another kind wondering about who are the physicists, and who aren't and why? Diving into the research addressing these questions, and being asked to talk about them, made me realize that showing myself as just one of the many ways a physicist looks like might be of relevance in trying to make science accessible for more, and shifting the gender and racial landscape of physics towards what reflects our society at large. When younger ladies approach me with either physics questions or guidance, or when my more seasoned colleagues end up discussing issues related to underrepresentation I feel that this bit of a self-imposed responsibility is not meaningless.

As for finding time to do all this, yes, that is a real issue. Everything you wish to do well takes time. Everything. So I give substantial time and energy to these projects. Often my weekends get eaten. Admittedly it goes on the expense of my research productivity as well. We all have equal amounts of time, and we all can choose how to spend it. I try to choose and distribute my time on what I expect to be fulfilling projects, and projects that might make a bigger difference. Now, with embracing documentary film making in my life, exploring deeper my own scientific and artistic creativity, the question of time management also needs some reevaluating attention.

Q. I noticed your shoe collection coffee table book. I love the cover! What is the story behind this book?
Hah, yes, the shoe book! The shoe book is part of my personal journey towards self-acceptance. For many years I was separating different aspects of my life, feeling that for example my love for fashion does not sit well with a career in physics. I thought that in order to be taken seriously in the science world, in particular in the world of theoretical physics, where the number of female practitioners has been - and still is - very low, I would need to not draw attention to my looks, but be more like one of the guys in order to be taken seriously. Hence the ever increasing number and style of shoes stayed hidden until the point where I felt confident enough to embrace all parts of myself under one hat. This moment happened when I felt I had put enough on the physics table to prove that I am not only a curious but also a capable scientist, who happened to have a shoe collection. So my decision of “coming out” was to celebrate my collection with photos and stories acknowledging each pair, and creating a coffee table book. This step indeed made me more relaxed to be who I am in any, including physics, environment.

I believe that everyone can reach their full potential only if they can be themselves. If you have to spend effort to hide and suppress, and be someone whom you are not that is not good for you, and not good for whatever job you are doing. This brings me back to the diversity and inclusion question in physics (and all other fields where there are minorities embedded in dominant groups) - there is not one way to be a scientist, there is not one way to look like a scientist, and we would all be benefiting (inside and outside of science) for embracing this instead of holding on to limiting stereotypes.

Q. Have you ever regretted doing outreach or felt that it has gotten in the way of your research?
Well, regret no. Got in the way, most certainly. But I would not call it got in the way, I rather embrace that I place value on it and thus I made a purposeful choice to do it. It is important to me though that colleagues, who's opinion I respect tremendously, do not consider my explorations into new territories with dismissal. Their acceptance of my non-traditional physicist career is crucial in me continuing on that road.

Q. How did you get involved in doing outreach?
I will be straightforward and confess that I do not like to use the word outreach. There is a tendency to associate outreach with something one is requested to do by funding agencies to keep research grants flowing. Yet, there are lots of wonderful colleagues who engage with passion in activities involving a wider audience. As mentioned above, these all take time. And I wish the scientific community at large would place serious value on such activities from a junior researcher too, besides the high value that is placed on research publications. But, in a way, the current system of values does not allow for that, almost penalizing those who are interested besides research in science communication activities.

That said, I consider the beginning of my involvement when I joined the faculty of Pratt Institute, where the leading disciplines are that of the arts, design and architecture. I was intrigued by the fact that Pratt hires scientists to teach their amazing student body. So I went for the challenge and found it so inspiring to me that I stuck around. Many of my creative science communicating works (like videos, fashion shows, and exhibits) and collaborations are born from being exposed to a mostly non-scientific world at Pratt, allowing me to explore a side of me that was mostly unexplored before.

I did not break my ties with Brookhaven National Lab, it is an essential part of my life that I do not wish to let go, but rather bring it into my and others lives in new ways. Be that by bringing my students, as well as faculty and even administration from Pratt to visit what I call the “wow factory,” that is the particle collider, or have my artist students meet and collaborate with other scientists, or by designing and co-teaching a course that brings physics and filmmaking under one hat, running part of the class with access to Brookhaven’s state of the art research facilities, or by heading to bars and theaters talking about research either under Brookhaven umbrella or other STEM-related events, or by contributing my efforts to the User’s Executive Committee of the collider.

So lots of the outreach is born from being embedded both in the scientific and artistic worlds, from finding the connections and telling the science through new mediums and languages, hoping that a wider audience previously perhaps not exposed or not curious, would give it all a chance.

Q. From all your outreach projects, which type of outreach do you find most effective, and which type do you find most rewarding?
It is hard to measure the effectiveness for some types of outreach, hence part of the judgment is based on direct and indirect feedback, and on the continued and increased interest.

Let me highlight the Fusion Project Runway as an example of what I find effective. This twice a year project was born out of the idea that different people learn in different ways and so besides more typical exams, why not access and express knowledge in new creative ways. So my artist and designer students are expected to internalize the physics and astronomy they learn in the following way: pick a topic from the semester that they fancied most, research that topic beyond class material, and create a science-art fusion project in the medium of their choice. Then, they’ll have a timed presentation in front of a panel of judges, experts brought in from the world of physics and art/design. Thus each fusion project undergoes scrutiny from their scientific and artistic merit as well. Students also perform written peer evaluations of each other. The peer evaluations are later made anonymous and given to the individual evaluated. The variety of works is rich (animation, film, fashion, jewelry, painting, sculpture, photography, industrial and interior design, poetry, dance, music, and more). My experience is that you can engage people through their own comfortable medium, and they can truly blossom, and get to the bottom of complex scientific concepts and processes through their own creative ways. Many of these works end up being part of public shows, exhibits, and publications. Often I invite the artists to join me onstage and be part of the production. And there is another effect to all this: in science we communicate through graphs, equations, articles; here we use other languages, for instance telling science stories through garments; or jewelry pieces can be real conversation starters - to name just a couple. This way, potentially reaches new audiences as well.

As for what’s rewarding, I consider some of the teaching and building lasting relationships in cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists and designers, as well as going to venues to tell about the science embedding in it different art forms to be extremely rewarding. Making people fall in love with subjects they did not think they’d even be interested in is something I take great enjoyment in. You know, when people’s faces light up in their aha moments of awe. We all are like that, when we get to understand something we feel good and it can provide a step towards wanting to know more. I feel that inspiring people and being inspired by them - is a wonderful part of my life. And perhaps I can make a difference - that is all what I can hope for. The more things I do, the more interested I get to keep doing more and keep challenging myself with new ideas and new ways of telling science stories. I thus now landed into a new area, making documentaries - for now rooted in some aspect of science- a super exciting and rewarding experience, an exploration that is here to stay as my activity.

I also find the congressional visits I take part in each spring quiet inspiring. On Capitol Hill we get to meet sharp and knowledgeable elected officials and staffers, some aligned with my political views, some perpendicular. Talking to them and discussing the value of fundamental research and why government funding is indispensable for simply curiosity driven research, and what benefits we already enjoy from this type of research is rewarding. These visits are exhausting, with a busy rolling schedule, yet it gives a sort of high at the end of the day, you feel that you did something important, and you walk away with an aura of hope.

Q. What advice would you give to others doing outreach?
I am not sure there is any advice to give, other than if you have the tiniest spark to explore some kind out outreach work then go for it. I almost guarantee that if you engage you will find a kind of gratification that it’s worth your time.