The Ongoing Transformation

Latest Episodes:

How Can STEMM Do A Better Job of Caring for Its Caregivers? Jun 04, 2024

Show notes

Caregiving is a nearly universal human experience, but it’s not often thought of as an issue with implications for our nation’s science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) enterprise. A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action, seeks to change that. In some academic STEMM environments, devoting time to care for family members is still seen as a taboo subject because it clashes with the idealized notion of scientists who focus exclusively on their work. The lack of legal and institutional support for caregivers drives many people to leave STEMM fields altogether. What can be done to change this inequity?

On this episode, Issues editor Sara Frueh talks to Elena Fuentes-Afflick, chair of the report committee and a professor of pediatrics and vice dean for the School of Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital at the University of California San Francisco. Fuentes-Afflick talks about the pressures of balancing caregiving with a STEMM career; how complex and poorly implemented policies are hurting workers and the economy; and steps that the government, universities, and others could take to make a difference.

Resources:

Read the Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Actionreport and find more resources.
Learn more about federal policies and practices to support STEMM caregivers by reading the National Science and Technology Council’s report.
Find more of Elena Fuentes-Afflick’s work on her website.

Kei Koizumi Advises the President May 21, 2024

Show notes

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, Kei Koizumi takes us inside the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP. As the principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, Koizumi occupies an unusual position at the very heart of science policy in the United States. OSTP provides science and technology advice to the president and executive office, works with federal agencies and legislators to create S&T policy, and helps strengthen and advance American science and technology. Koizumi talks to Issues editor Lisa Margonelli about what he does at OSTP, how he got there, and the exciting developments in S&T policy that get him out of bed every day.

Are you involved in science and technology policy? From science for policy to policy for science, from the merely curious to full-on policy wonks, we would love to hear from all of you! Please visit our survey page to share your thoughts and provide a better understanding of who science policy professionals are, what they do, and why—along with a sense of how science policy is changing and what its future looks like.

Resources:

Visit the Office of Science and Technology Policy website to learn more about OSTP’s work.
Read Issues’s interview with Arati Prabhakar, current director of OSTP.
Also in Issues, learn more about the creation of the National Nanotechnology Initiative from Neal Lane, science advisor to President Clinton.
Check out Science’s Uncertain Authority in Policy by John Marburger, science advisor to President George W. Bush, to learn more about the interactions between science and the political process.

To Fix Health Misinformation, Think Beyond Fact Checking May 07, 2024

Show notes

When tackling the problem of misinformation, people often think first of content and its accuracy. But countering misinformation by fact-checking every erroneous or misleading claim traps organizations in an endless game of whack-a-mole. A more effective approach may be to start by considering connections and communities. That is particularly important for public health, where different people are vulnerable in different ways.

On this episode, Issues editor Monya Bakertalks with global health professionals Tina Purnat and Elisabeth Wilhelm about how public health workers, civil society organizations, and others can understand and meet communities’ information needs.Purnat led the World Health Organization’s team that strategized responses to misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic. She is also a coeditor of the book Managing Infodemics in the 21st Century. Wilhelmhas worked in health communications at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, and USAID.

Resources

Visit Tina Purnat and Elisabeth Wilhelm’s websites to learn more about their work and find health misinformation resources.
Check out Community Stories Guide to explore how public health professionals can use stories to understand communities’ information needs and combat misinformation.
How is an infodemic manager like a unicorn? Visit the WHO Infodemic Manager Training website to find training resources created by Purnat and Wilhelm, and learn about the skills needed to become an infodemiologist.

Amanda Arnold Sees the Innovation Ecosystem from a Unique Perch Apr 16, 2024

Show notes

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, we explore another sector of science policy: private industry. Amanda Arnold is the vice president of governmental affairs and policy at Valneva, a private vaccine development company, where she works on policy for creating, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines that address unmet medical needs, such as for Lyme and Zika.

Arnold has worked in the science policy realm for over twenty years, first as a policy staffer for a US senator, then as a legislative liaison for the National Institutes of Health, and as a senior policy advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arnold talks to editor Megan Nicholson about the role industry plays in the science policy enterprise and what she has learned about the US innovation ecosystem from working across sectors.

Resources:

Read Amanda Arnold’s Issues article, “Rules for Operating at Warp Speed,” to learn about how the government can work to rapidly respond to future crises.

Check out Ensuring an Effective Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise and the Strategic National Stockpile reports to learn more about the issues Amanda thinks about in vaccine development policy.

Want to learn more about convergence? Check out these reports:

(1) The Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences (2013)

(2) Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond (2014)

(3) Fostering the Culture of Convergence in Research (2019)

This Eclipse Could Make You Cry–And Make New Scientists Apr 02, 2024

Show notes

Douglas Duncan is an astronomer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also an eclipse fanatic. Since 1970, he has been to 11 total solar eclipses. When April 8, 2024, comes around, he’ll experience his twelfth with his 600 best friends as he leads a three-day eclipse viewing extravaganza in Texas. “It looks like the end of the world,” he says, and a total eclipse can be a source of intense fascination. He uses the emotional experience of the eclipse as a gateway to learning more about science.

On this episode, Lisa Margonelli talks to Duncan about how he has used this sense of experiential wonder, particularly in planetariums, as a way to invite the public into the joy of science. In previous generations, planetariums were seen as “old fashioned” and isolated from the work of modern astronomers. But Duncan pioneered a career track that combined public teaching at a planetarium with a faculty position at the University of Colorado. Now many planetariums have become places where academic astronomers can share their knowledge with the public.

Resources:

Visit Doug Duncan’s website to learn more about his work.

Read about his work at NASA.

Want to photograph the solar eclipse? Duncan has made an app for that called Solar Snap.

Learn more about using eclipses to engage the public.

See the itinerary for Duncan’s “Totality Over Texas” trip, which will be attended by 600 people. The trip offers three days of eclipse-related activities.

Science Policy IRL: Walter Valdivia Researches for the White House Mar 12, 2024

Show notes

The Science Policy IRL series pulls back the curtain on who does what in science policy and how they shaped their career path. In previous episodes we’ve looked at the cosmology of science policy through the eyes of people who work at federal agencies and the National Academies, but this time we are exploring think tanks.

Walter Valdivia describes how a chance encounter while he was getting a PhD in public policy at Arizona State University led him into science policy. Since then he’s worked at think tanks including Brookings and the Mercatus Center and is now at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which does research for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this episode, we’ll talk to Walter about what think tanks do in the policy world and how policy sometimes creates inherent paradoxes.

Resources:

Visit the Institute for Defense Analysis’ Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) to learn more about Walter’s current work.

Check out the book, Between Politics and Science by David Guston, to see what inspired Walter’s career in science policy. Here is the first chapter.

Visit the Center for Nanotechnology in Society’s website.

Read Walter and David Guston’s paper, “Responsible innovation: A primer for policymakers.”

Read “Is Patent Protection Industrial Policy?” to learn more about policy paradoxes.

Check out The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke, Jr. to learn more about the role of impartial expertise.

Interested in learning more about Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs)? Read this primer.

Building Community in the Bayou Feb 27, 2024

Show notes

At the age of 19, Monique Verdin picked up a camera and began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that she would spend the next two decades investigating and capturing the profound ways that climate, the fossil fuel industry, and the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico would transform the landscape that was once a refuge for her Houma ancestors.

Based in Louisiana, Verdin is an artist, storyteller, videographer, and photographer, as well as a community builder and activist. She is also the director of the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, a project that seeks to create a community record of the coastal cultures and native ecology of southeast Louisiana. Her work, which was featured in the Winter print edition of Issues, seeks to understand home and belonging after displacement and migration. Her stories are laced with environmental concerns, the shifting roles of corporate entities, and natural and human-made disasters. Verdin’s art practice creates space and gives voice to Indigenous and marginalized communities in the South while building bridges with science communities.

On this episode, Verdin joins host JD Talasek to talk about using art and science to understand a Gulf that is being reshaped by climate, industry, and more.

Resources:

Alta Charo Considers Ethics for Stem Cells and CRISPR Feb 13, 2024

Show notes

A lawyer and bioethicist by training, Alta Charo has decades of experience in helping to formulate and inform science policy on new and emerging technologies, including stem cells, cloning, CRISPR, and chimeras. The Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she served on President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, was a member of President Obama’s transition team, was an advisor for the Food and Drug Administration, and served on more than a dozen study committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In the fourth episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Alta joins Issues contributing editor Molly Galvin to explore how science policy can and does impact people’s lives in real and profound ways. She also describes what it’s like to be one of the only non-scientists at the science policy table, how helping a close friend who died of ALS continues to inspire her work, and why science policy can help us become techno optimists.

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

Resources:

National Academies Collection on Stem Cell Research

Institute of Medicine. 2005. Review of the HIVNET 012 Perinatal HIV Prevention Study

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and National Academy of Medicine. 2023. Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance

The Issues Interview: Alta Charo

Previous episodes of Science Policy IRL

Zach Pirtle Explores Ethics for Mars Landings

Apurva Dave Builds Connections Between National Security and Climate

Quinn Spadola Develops Nanotechnology With Soft Power

Zach Pirtle Explores Ethics for Mars Landings Jan 30, 2024

Show notes

NASA’s Artemis project aims to establish a long-term human presence on the moon—and then put astronauts on Mars. So in addition to designing rockets and spacesuits, NASA is also exploring the ethical and societal implications of living in space. In the third episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Zach Pirtle, who got his undergraduate degrees in engineering and philosophy at Arizona State University, explains how he came to work in the agency’s Office of Technology Policy and Strategy, where he recently organized a seminar on space ethics. He also works as a program executive within the Science Mission Directorate working on commercial lunar payload services. Zach joins Issues editor-in-chief Lisa Margonelli to talk about how he almost accidentally found his way to a perfect career, and how agencies engage hands-on in science policy as they figure out how to implement legislation.

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

Resources:

Presidential Management Fellows Program
National Academies’ Mirzayan Fellowship
AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships
Daniel Sarewitz, emeritus co-director at ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes
NASA Artemis
Artemis, Ethics and Society: Synthesis from a Workshop
NASA named best place to work in the federal government
How Would You Defend the Planet From Asteroids? –an Issues article by Mahmud Farooque and Jason Kessler

Turning a Policy Idea Into a Pilot Project Jan 10, 2024

Show notes

By day, Erica Fuchs is a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. However, for the past year she’s also been running a pilot project—the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment—to give the federal government the ability to anticipate problems in supply chains and respond to them.

The trip from germ of a policy idea to pilot project in the National Science Foundation’s new Technology Implementation and Partnerships directorate has been a wild ride. And it all started when she developed her thoughts on the need for a national technology strategy into a 2021 Issues essay. Two years later, the network she called for, coordinating dozens of academics, industry, and government contributors to uniquely understand how different supply chains work, was a real, NSF-funded pilot project. In this episode of The Ongoing Transformation, Erica talks with Lisa Margonelli about how she took her idea from a white paper to the White House, and the bipartisan political support that was necessary to bring it to fruition.

Resources