I have never been called narcissistic (at least not outright), but I do enjoy seeing my name on things, I will be honest. This last summer I had the joy of getting some publicity for the research internship that I was a part of with the USDA-ARS at the Northern Great Plains Research Lab in Mandan, ND. I worked in a soil research lab for about 8 weeks, and at the end of my summer I gave a seminar as a part of the internship requirements. The lab was able to drum up some publicity for me, and I managed to get my face in the local newspaper and into an article in Farm and Ranch Guide. After reading through the articles, I realized that there is one small issue with getting science published in mass media outlets: most writers are not scientists, and most scientists are not writers.
This is not to say that the stories that were written were bad or inaccurate, in fact, for their intended purpose they were exactly what they should have been. They were great human interest pieces that highlighted the internship program as a way to get people interested in science, and specifically agricultural science. Unfortunately the science that I did over the summer was difficult to understand and even more difficult to write about in a way that would be interesting to the general public. If the implications of my research were more far-reaching, then maybe the focus of the article would have been on the science, but in 8 weeks I really just managed to do some moderately interesting work on extraction methods, depth analysis and spectrofluorophotometry. Unfortunately even really interesting or extremely important research can be misreported or passed off as a human interest piece instead of a front page breaking news article.
My aim is to do two things here: 1.) report interesting and relevant scientific research across the fields of health, biology, ecology and environmental science and 2.) tell my story of how I came to love science and document my story through my undergraduate and graduate school experiences. My hope is that my story will make at least one other person somewhere in the world realize that they have a passion for science, and then maybe one other person will be inspired by their story, and then maybe after not too long there is another generation of people who want to ask questions and do research and who have the ambition to inquire about what is going on in the world beneath the surface of our day to day lives.
