A lot of Americans don’t know a single scientist. We need to fix that

I’ve recently been thinking about this: There are a lot of Americans who don’t know a single scientist.

This is one of our biggest failures as a community. When we March for Science in April, we’ll be fighting for our right to freely communicate with the people whose taxes fund our work and the legislators who we hope will use our work to inform policymaking. But we haven’t done a good job of actually communicating with people about what we do.

As a first-year graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, I’m spending the year trying out different laboratories before picking the one where I’ll do my thesis work. Along with observing experiments, I get to watch how senior scientists interact with the public. The depressing truth is that many don’t.

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