Grad Student “Stories” Make Complex Research Accessible
Spark! Symposium develops speaking skills to reach diverse audiences
More people fear speaking in public than fear snakes, heights, spiders and even dying, according to the 2022 Chapman University Survey of American Fears. So, if the five people who took the stage at the University of Delaware Graduate College’s fall 2023 Spark! Symposium on Sept. 20 felt a little dread, who would blame them?
“I’m generally terrified about public speaking, but I know it’s such a huge part of academia,” said Abigail Bower, a doctoral student in interdisciplinary neuroscience, who was chosen as the Ignite Award winner by the panel of six Spark! judges. “I thought that when I got up there, my voice was going to be shaking — I was much less nervous than I expected because we had practiced so much, and we got a lot of great feedback we could incorporate.”
The biannual Spark! Symposium gives UD graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to present short-form talks on their research to a diverse audience. All presenters receive individual coaching from Suprawee Tepsuporn, the Graduate College’s senior assistant dean.
“I relish the one-to-one time with the Spark! presenters,” Tepsuporn said. “I love learning about the students’ cutting-edge research and discoveries and helping them articulate the impact of their work to broader communities.”
An important part of the preparation process is working with actor and director Steve Tague, interim chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance and producing director for UD’s Resident Ensemble Players (REP).
“It’s a crazy mix of science and art, but that’s at least half the reason that I like doing it,” he said. “The other half is the students themselves. I really believe that when a young person devotes hours and hours and hours — many of those hours incredibly tedious — to a specific discipline, there must be a strong vein of passion in there somewhere. Getting that out is my job, and I find it very moving, every time.”
The symposium’s artful approach to research talks is what appeals to members of the audience too, like Devashish Pande, also a doctoral student in neuroscience.
“I find these talks inspiring because it requires some creativity from the speakers to take their science to a lay audience,” he said. “Research is a slow process that takes a lot of time and effort, and people can understand it better if it’s conveyed in the form of a story.”
Crafting tales of research
The starting place for crafting relatable research stories is grappling with how to give people the information they need to understand a problem when there isn’t a lot of time and they don’t have a lot of expertise. For Bower, that meant helping her audience understand how functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool to measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, can be used to see the impact of Parkinson’s disease during body movement.
“For my talk, I went with what I am currently working on in the lab,” she said. “But then it gets hard to pare it down from everything that would go into a paper into what can I give in a 10-minute talk for people, where I have to start with the basics, like what is Parkinson’s disease, what is an fMRI? That’s the part I struggled with — being able to pare it down from everything I wanted to talk about, because there’s so much backstory that you have to put into it to give it to a general audience.”
Thabu Mugala, the Spark! audience choice for the winner of the Glow Award, framed the story of her doctoral research problem in entomology and wildlife ecology with a fictional Maryland farmer she called “Godfrey.” Godfrey was Mugala’s generalization from the many farmers she talks with in her work to control slugs that cause crop damage with parasitic nematodes, microscopic worms that destroy these pests.
“I could have given a lot of statistics about cover crops, but people wouldn’t have remembered them,” she said. “I wanted to help people understand how farmers see the role of covering crops in their problems with slugs and I wanted them to understand ‘where I’m coming from,’ how I thought of the problem.
“And then, I was surprised by how the audience engaged with the problem and the challenging questions they asked about things like business and economic impact when my main point was really ‘there is an eco-friendly solution to the slug problem in corn and soybeans,’” she added, laughing.
When an area of research is far outside our common experience, an analogy may be what you need.
Rene Hoover, a microbiology doctoral candidate, is working on identifying biomarkers to detect the role Gallionellaceae iron-oxidizing bacteria play in the transition of iron from Fe (II) to Fe (III) in freshwater ecosystems. She had to find a simple way to explain her search for “the culprits” in complex systems where hundreds of distinct bacteria species drive biogeochemical cycles.
“By comparing the ecosystem to a garden, a biome that people understand at a macro level, and iron to a cabbage crop, I wanted people to connect with the detective work I do as a microbiologist to solve the mystery of who is ‘raiding the garden’ and eating the ‘cabbage,’ the iron,” she said. “I hope that helping people understand science as an engaging detective story will make the public more aware of what good science is and inspire more people to pursue STEM.”
Brigette Romero Carpio, a doctoral candidate in medical sciences, also needed an analogy to explain how the complex molecular interactions between DNA and circular RNAs (circRNAs) matter in her search for a way to identify children with spastic cerebral palsy (CP), the most common physical disability arising in childhood according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The condition can’t be cured yet, but the symptoms, like joint and muscle stiffness, with their accompanying pain, can be relieved with earlier diagnosis and appropriate intervention.
“If we compare the role of circular RNAs to dancers who are part of a concert, it’s easier to understand why they are good choices for biomarkers to use in developing a noninvasive blood test to diagnose CP in infants,” she said. “The biggest challenge in a Spark! presentation is that our training as scientists teaches us to deal with the nitty-gritty of facts and data, not emotions, but the audience needs that appeal to understand why the research matters.”
Cara Kelly wanted her doctoral research in human development and family sciences to touch the heart as well.
“The pandemic highlighted the challenges of finding reliable, high-quality child care,” she said. “Teachers are key to implementing high-quality child care, and my study takes a first step in identifying how teachers define quality in child care settings to promote optimal early learning environments for young children.
“My job in talking about my research is helping people connect emotionally to why teachers’ opinions matter. We need quality assessments that work for all center-based child care settings and the kind of child care that makes us a healthy society.”
Research at UD is a ‘never-ending story’
UD has a wealth of stories to tell as one of 146 institutions in the U.S. awarded R1 status by the Carnegie Foundation for conducting a high level of groundbreaking research.
Ready to tell your research story? Want to hear a good one? The next Spark! Symposium will take place on April 18. The speaker application process will open in November. Check the Spark! Symposium page for updates.
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Photo by Evan Krape.