The American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Fellowship changed my life, as it has for many other scientists before and since. If you’re a scientist in training who wants to instead do science journalism or science communication, this is the fellowship you need to get. Here’s my advice on applying.
My advice for applying (as an application reviewer and former fellow)
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t have many writing samples on your resume. It obviously helps to have more experience in that you will likely be a better writer/communicator if you have done it before, gotten feedback, or refined your skills. But there’s no specific requirement to have clips or past experience. (In fact, I rarely look at people’s CVs when I’m reviewing applications.) What’s most important is that you show in your submitted writing samples that you understand how to communicate and are capable of learning and improving those skills.
In your application, your main mission is to use your short answers and writing samples to persuade the reviewer that 1) you specifically would greatly benefit from this fellowship, 2) you understand what you’ll be asked to do in the fellowship (write about science — likely different subjects than your own field of study — for a broad audience) and 3) you could, with three days’ orientation training and a couple days of mentorship, produce a pretty decent newspaper article during the first week of your fellowship, if asked.
You don’t need to be able to do this now, necessarily! But you need to show that you could do that. How?
Treat your short answers as your resume. In your short answers, you get to tell the story that bullet points on your CV can’t: What you’re passionate about, how your previous experiences led you here, and why this is a logical stepping stone for your career. (Also, since not everybody reads your resume, if there’s something relevant to why you’re qualified, you should be sure to mention it here!)
Avoid writing generically about how important science communication is, and write something only you can write. How have you realized the importance of science communication in your own life? E.g.:
- Are you passionate about helping people understand scientists better, and realized that you really like engaging with the public on policy issues and want to get better at communicating because of that?
- Have you loved organizing citizen science events and helping people better understand your branch of science, and thus are really good at explaining science stuff to people?
- What circumstances led you to fall first in, then a little bit out of love with science? What steps have you taken to see if science communication is a viable career path for you?
Help the reviewers get a sense of how your experiences have led you to the fellowship and what you want to take away from this experience. Talk about what you’ve learned so far, and show that you have a capacity to learn more. And of course, remember that we’re getting a sense of your writing skill from your short answers.
In your writing samples, show you can write. When I review the science story writing sample in applications, I’m looking for 1) a basic understanding of what a news story’s purpose is and how it differs from, say, a class essay; 2) voice and natural writing skill. If it’s a good news article with great writing, that’s amazing. And if the structure of the story is a bit off but you still show a good talent for stringing together compelling sentences, that’s okay too!
Don’t give up if you don’t get the fellowship. As with many fellowships, there are more qualified applicants than there are spots. Some semifinalists don’t get the fellowship simply because of the host site matching process, which is complicated and tries to take into account both your preferences and the preferences of the host sites. If you get feedback on your application, take it to heart and keep writing or podcasting or communicating, keep trying to get better, and keep applying.
A few do’s and don’ts
Do: Show that you understand the assignment. You’d be surprised by how many people just don’t grasp what they’re supposed to write in the application (ie, me, in my first application, as you’ll see in my materials.) The vast majority of the host sites are news publications; you need to show that you could be a good writer in that genre and that you understand you won’t be primarily writing personal essays, opinion pieces, creative non-fiction, term papers, etc.
Do: Feel free to write the science story on a paper from your field of research. One of the criteria applicants are graded on is their scientific expertise. Make sure to explain your field of study and your research in your short answers (this is where grad students and postdocs often have an advantage over undergrads, unfortunately). But another place to show your command of science is in your science writing sample. It makes it easier for you to show your explanatory skill if you yourself are not struggling to understand the research; don’t make it any harder than it has to be!
What we’re looking for is along the lines of: Can you explain why this research is important? Can you do so without using too much jargon? Can you get into the headspace of your reader and understand how they will see the story, what they need to know, and what they might be confused about?
It’s a tough balance, though: During your fellowship, you will undoubtedly be asked to write about something in a different field. It’s great to show that you have range, and can quickly understand something you have never heard of. If you find places to show that in your application and in the science writing sample, great! But know that it’s totally okay and normal to write about your own field for the big science writing sample.
Don’t: Get too creative…or recycle an unsuitable sample. In your additional writing sample (and any supplemental writing samples), I would avoid class essays/research papers or any other sample written for a very specific format (legal brief, social media, scientific paper, etc).
Ideally, your additional writing sample would be a news-style article you wrote previously, or perhaps a personal essay that also helps explain your relationship to science or science communication. In these samples, again, the mission is to show that you have good writing skills, so if you’re making a hard choice, err on the side of “shows off my good writing” rather than “showcases my subject matter expertise.”
If you have great podcast samples, an interactive website, a video, that’s great! Include those as supplementary materials. But with your main two writing samples, don’t get too creative with stretching the boundaries of what kind of thing you’re submitting, unless you can show that you know the rules first (again, a mistake I made in my first application.)
Don’t: Write the science story as if it’s a class assignment. This is an understandable mistake I’ve seen a lot of people make. The sample is written as if the person reading it is a teacher who is already familiar with the research study and is measuring how well the writer summarized everything the researchers did.
- ❌ For example, people will write, “In a paper, Liu et al showed that…” Who is Liu? The reader has zero context for who that is and it doesn’t convey any information.
- ✅ “Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently showed that…” or “A group of researchers led by Lucretia Liu, a microbiology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, recently demonstrated…” is much better.
Do: Think of it as if you’re writing an article that someone accidentally clicked on and you have to keep them interested so they don’t open TikTok instead.
How do you get them interested? Start with something surprising, or something that sets up a situation that makes the reader say, “Wait a second, I gotta hear more!” (This is what we in the journalism business call a “lede.”)
Basic journalistic story structure
Just like there’s a structure to scientific papers (introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion), there’s a structure to news articles (the inverted pyramid; or at least the lede, nutgraf, body, kicker). Make sure you use those structure elements or you will accidentally sound like a fool (like I did!) These Storygrams on The Open Notebook’s site helpfully break down the structure of different writers’ stories.
First, come up with a lede as I described above — something to grab the reader’s attention.
Then you have a couple sentences to finish demonstrating why the person should read the other 650 words of the story. You can insert a little bit of context here, but just enough to set up your big pitch, which explains “why does this matter?” In journalism slang, we call this the “nut graf.” Think of it as the rest of the story “in a nutshell.”
In the nut graf, you should outline where the rest of the story is going and set up the stakes. What’s the big problem? Why does that problem matter? Why has it been tricky to solve so far? What kind of solution did the researchers find? Or what kind of new fact did the researchers discover, and what’s the impact of that new realization? This key paragraph will help propel the reader into the body of the story.
The body of the story explains exactly what the researchers did, what the results are, what they mean, and any questions not answered by the study. You don’t need to list everything that they did — that in fact is quite boring. Only highlight the experiments and results that support the important stuff you outlined in the top of the story near your nut graf: How did they prove their surprising solution was valid? How did they find a way around the previously insurmountable technical hurdles? How did they discover that previously unknown or unrealized fact?
At the end, after you’ve explained everything about the study, you should have some kind of “kicker,” a closing thought to leave the audience with. This is often a quote. (You 100% do not have to interview anyone for this study story; the application reviewers do not expect you to.) It can also be a conundrum, a gesture toward the future, a statement about what comes next, something that brings us full circle to the beginning of the story, or any other kind of conclusion you’d like. Try to make your reader feel some sort of way: inspired, full of dread, or even make them laugh.
A note on host sites
The host sites for the MMF vary every year, but include national magazines, local newspapers, local radio stations, national radio stations, specialty web publications, etc. Everyone wants to work for Scientific American, Wired, NPR, etc., but depending on what your end goals are, that may not be the ideal publication for you.
If you’re on the fence about mentioning specific host sites in your application: Know that there is a separate process for assigning fellows to host publications; if you are a semi-finalist, you will be asked for more details on which sites you’re interested in.
My pitch for why you might want to consider local outlets, especially newspapers, when thinking about host sites:
- You will write more stories. In my cohort, fellows placed at magazines wrote single-digit amounts of stories over the course of the summer; those of us at newspapers typically wrote over a dozen, some a couple dozen!
- With that increase in number of stories comes:
- More experience!
- Variety in types of stories (explainers, short news pieces, enterprise, etc.)
- Variety of reporting skills (more chances to do in-person reporting; experience with man-on-the-street interviews; working with photographers; finding non-scientific sources like local non-profits, government officials, professional organizations, etc.)
- Opportunity to do fast-turnaround stories. Learning how to write on deadline is extremely useful if you want to work as a staff reporter in the future, and the fellowship is an extremely friendly place to get that experience. Magazines work on a much longer time horizon than newspapers, which try to get the news up as quickly as possible, or need to fill tomorrow’s print edition.
- You get way more experience in thinking about how the public (the entire population of a city) engages with science rather than just how science-interested people engage with science
- You get way more experience writing about things that aren’t just scientific studies (even though all my stories were related to science or health, I only wrote about one actual scientific paper all summer) and depending on your career goals, that may be really useful.
I am biased because I was placed at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and ended up loving it. I too wanted to work for the big magazines, but based on my conversations with friends who did their MMFs at magazines and went on to get staff reporter jobs, I think the experience I got at a local newspaper set me up for a future as a full-time reporter much better than working at a magazine would have.
Examples of AAAS Mass Media Fellowship applications
Several former fellows have shared what they had on their AAAS MMF applications, along with their advice:
Short answers
Why are you, as a scientist or engineer, interested in participating in this program?
I never “fell in love” with science the way some of my friends did; all my life, I wanted to be a writer. I learned to read when I was four and started scribbling out short stories as soon as I learned to string together sentences. Though it wasn’t love at first sight, over the years I have become increasingly engrossed with science—with how much we can figure out about the universe from numbers describing things we can’t see, the many ways science touches our lives without people knowing it, and the power we have to radically change our lives if only we understood a little more about how nature works. Through doing research on solar cells, semiconductors, and water purification, I’ve gotten to look at our world in a new way.
I wanted to become a writer because I wanted to tell stories, and there are so many stories to tell in science. There are stories that people don’t care about, don’t know that they care about, or are afraid of. As both scientists and story-tellers, we have the power to change that. I hope that through this fellowship, I can learn the journalistic skills I need to help people understand science the way scientists do. My undergrad and PhD work have given me the ability to understand and interpret scientific information, and I am excited about both de-mystifying scientific topics for non-scientists and also sharing the curious stories behind the science we unwittingly use every day.
What in your background has prepared you for this fellowship?
My background has given me extensive experience in writing, science, and writing about science. In the past year, I have had the opportunity to freelance for publications like Chemical & Engineering News, Chemistry World, and InChemistry. Most recently, I’ve developed a forthcoming regular column at the Graduate & Postdoctoral Chemist magazine to discuss struggles and failure as a graduate student, postdoc, or career chemist.
In undergrad, I chose to combine my technical knowledge with the training I received in my science writing coursework and write an honors thesis in both of my majors: a chemistry thesis about my dye-sensitized solar cell research and an English portfolio thesis about science communication. For the portfolio, I wrote about my solar research in several genres, including a grant application, a press release, and a Scientific American-style feature. The project gave me the opportunity think about genre and adjust the scientific content and language to best reach the piece’s audience.
I also gained experience with technical writing and fact-checking during my three years as a question writer at National Academic Quiz Tournaments. At NAQT, I used primary and secondary sources to write paragraph-long, in-depth questions about topics like literature, art, mythology, and religion, using suggestions from editors to revise and strengthen the questions. I am excited to build upon my existing skills through the AAAS training workshops and by working with other journalists during the fellowship.
How do you think the skills learned from the fellowship will impact your future career or academic plans?
I’ve always wanted to tell stories. I’m also interested in making science more digestible for non-scientists, so I’m curious whether science journalism is a good way for me pursue both of those goals at once. In recent years, I’ve found myself increasingly looking up the facts on subjects like vaccines, “sulfur” allergies, lead-tainted water, and carbon monoxide poisoning to help my friends and family better understand what these terms mean. My scientific training has made me better at divining the facts from the fat and my training in communication has helped me deliver the scientific information in a way the person I’m addressing will understand.
Though I’ve learned how to write and edit my own writing through my English degree and my freelance work, I haven’t yet gained experience in the journalistic side of writing. I’m looking forward to strengthening my interviewing skills though my forthcoming column in the Graduate and Postdoctoral Chemist magazine, but during the fellowship, I’m also eager to learn how to get better at finding and pitching story ideas, how to gather sources for a story, and turn a piece around on deadline. Currently, the extent of my career plans is “not academia,” but science journalism might be a great way for me to combine science and stories in a single career. I am excited to gain more experience in science writing and figure out whether it would be a good fit for me!
Describe any activities, other than previous media experiences, you have undertaken that involved increasing public understanding of science and technology.
In an unconventional kind of science outreach, I ran a “Lab Friday” Snapchat series in my last year of undergrad. As the title indicates, I snapchatted what I did in lab on Fridays. I explained the principles of rotary evaporation (“rotovapping”), a common lab procedure that relies on a lot of simple phenomena like evaporation and condensation and pressure/temperature differences. I showed crystals I grew from recrystallizations and took pictures of many colorful column chromatography separations. My original intent was just to share the cool things I see every day that many people never have the opportunity to see, but the series ended up starting a lot of great conversations with people I would never have otherwise talked to about science. Engaging people with science in a fun and casual way increased their curiosity about my research and their positive views about science.
In terms of more formal outreach, I’ve recently begun participating in the Skype-A-Scientist program. As a child, I knew many nurses, policemen, and teachers and understood what they did, but I didn’t know many scientists. I also never really understood what science was, beyond knowing the geologic eras or memorizing the periodic table. I enjoy talking to students about my path to science and what science really looks like, sharing about a career I personally never had the opportunity to learn about until my late teens. Listening to their questions also helps me learn how non-scientists think about science and helps me become a better communicator.
What community outreach or educational activities have you participated in, science-related or otherwise?
Besides talking to students about my research and path to science though the Skype-A-Scientist program, I have enjoyed curating and leading lab tours and research demos for groups like the middle school girls at the Society of Women Engineers’ Girls’ Career Day or a class of artists from the Art Institute of Chicago.
It’s been my privilege to be involved with the quizbowl community, a community that shaped my passion for learning and competition during my high school and college years. Quizbowl questions move beyond the esoteric trivia facts in bar trivia or Trivial Pursuit by asking paragraph-long questions that move from harder clues to easier ones, prompting students to learn real things and make real connections between figures and events in history, authors and their literary works, artists and artistic movements, philosophies, mythologies, and religion, and mathematics and the sciences.
I have been able to serve the quizbowl community in several different ways: I’ve written questions for many tournaments, sometimes through my job at National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) and sometimes through house-written tournaments. In undergrad, I served as vice president of the Ohio State University Academic Team, organizing practices and tournaments for the university team as well as hosting tournaments for the Ohio high school circuit. I have also helped staff both local and national tournaments. It’s thrilling to help bring such a different mode of learning to students and is especially rewarding to give back to a community that had a huge impact on my life.
Have you had previous media-related experiences?
In undergrad, I regularly wrote for the university’s admissions blog, using my personal experiences to show what being a college student was like. I was one of several writers for the blog and reported to a member of the multimedia communications department, who trained us and edited our writing.
I have recently developed a column with Corrie Kuniyoshi at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Graduate & Postdoctoral Chemist magazine to discuss “imposter syndrome,” struggles, and failure in chemistry. The first article should be published in January 2020, with forthcoming bimonthly articles where I plan to interview chemists—professors, people working in science policy, journal editors, industry chemists—to talk about their struggles and their strategies for improving at both career skills and their mental attitudes toward failure and success. Before that, I also have had the opportunity to write for Linda Wang at the ACS’s premier magazine Chemical & Engineering News, Kit Chapman at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry World, and Natasha Bruce at InChemistry, the ACS’s magazine for undergrads.
Science writing sample
The maximum level of fluorinated toxins vegetables can absorb is ten or more times higher than levels reported in previous studies under typical soil conditions, according to a new study by researchers from Texas Tech.
Per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) are man-made compounds at the center of a growing national public health crisis. These compounds contain strong carbon – fluorine bonds that make PFAS useful for fire retardants used in furniture and carpets, fire-fighting foams used for extinguishing jet fuel fires, manufacturing products like Teflon and Scotchgard, and for water- and grease-proofing products like rain coats, popcorn bags, and takeout containers. However, PFAS have begun polluting both the ground and water through industrial wastewater releases, fire-fighting foams leaching into the soil (especially around military bases), and waste from consumer products.
The non-profit Environmental Working Group reports that PFAS have been found at nearly 1,400 sites in 49 US states. PFAS compounds have been linked to many serious health problems such as kidney and liver diseases, many kinds of cancers, and reproductive issues, even at very low (part-per-billion and part-per-trillion) exposure levels. Additionally, the strong bonds that make these compounds useful also make them nearly indestructible, and because PFAS compounds do not occur in nature, there are no biological mechanisms to break them down. Instead, they circulate and accumulate in the environment.
Researchers have become increasingly worried about PFAS migrating to plants from polluted water and soil, bio-accumulating in plants, animals, and humans as the compounds move up the food chain. Currently, many wastewater treatment plants recycle their recovered bio-solids as fertilizer, but in early 2019, the Seacoast Online newspaper reported that PFAS compounds were found in milk produced on a Maine dairy farm fertilized with wastewater bio-solids and watered with a PFAS-contaminated well. The state of Maine began testing bio-solids for PFAS and found PFAS contamination in all tested samples, prompting the state to stop using bio-solids for crop fertilization.
Crops grown in areas where the soil is more sandy and has less carbon content, such as the southwestern United States, may be able to concentrate PFAS compounds in their plant tissues more than crops grown in areas with more organic carbon content. In an effort to better understand how plants incorporate PFAS compounds when grown in PFAS-contaminated soils, researchers from Texas Tech University grew carrots, radishes, and alfalfa in conditions designed for maximum PFAS uptake. Because past studies have found that higher levels of organic carbon in the soil decreases PFAS incorporation into plant tissue, the researchers grew the vegetables in sand with 0% organic carbon instead of soil to encourage maximum PFAS incorporation. To test incorporation trends of different kinds of PFAS, they spiked the sand with six different PFAS compounds of varying chain length and end groups (PFBS, PFHxS, PFOS, PFHpA, PFOA, PFNA). Upon measuring the levels of different PFAS in the mature vegetables’ leaves and roots, they found that the levels of PFAS in their sand-grown crops were universally higher than plants grown in biosolids-amended soil.
In good news for consumers, results of the study also showed that PFAS levels were lower in the commonly eaten portions of the vegetables. The radishes’ and carrots’ roots carried lower concentrations of PFAS than their leaves, while the lower concentrations in alfalfa were found in the plant’s edible shoots. The researchers also found trends that further the understanding of how PFAS compounds are transported through plant tissues: the longer-chain PFAS tended to be incorporated into the plants less than the short-chain PFAS. If confirmed by further studies, this news may be encouraging, as research suggests short-chain PFAS (those with 6 or fewer carbons) are eliminated from the body faster than their long-chain relatives (8 carbons or longer), somewhere on the order of several months rather than several years.
These findings are timely, as earlier this year, the FDA found detectable amounts of PFAS in 14 out of 91 tested foods, including an incredibly high 17,000 parts-per-trillion level of short-chain PFAS compound PFPeA in an iced chocolate cake. The FDA currently does not have a guideline for human exposure to PFAS in food, instead using the reference doses the EPA set for exposure for two popular PFAS, PFOA and PFOS, of 0.02 micrograms per kilograms of body weight per day.
As officials and scientists continue to find PFAS-contaminated areas and foods across the country, a better understanding of PFAS uptake in food crops will help shape industrial best practices and federal limits for human exposure to PFAS.
General writing sample
“Flu shot: this is my first year getting the flu shot, and I have honestly experienced being more sick than usual. Especially when it comes to the flu. (stomach) [sic] The doctor really encourages Educators [sic] to get the shot every year to stay well, but I have not been well since I received it….I need factual answers….what am I missing? [sic] What is in this shot?”
Every fall, I see anti-vaccination posts pop up in my Facebook newsfeed, along with the other constant posts descrying the “harmful chemicals” found in food, household cleaners, and medicines. It’s sad to see these posts persuade friends that scientifically good or complicated things are completely bad, especially because they don’t have the scientific literacy skills to examine the claims being disseminated.
When I realized that I am often the only scientist on these people’s friends list, I felt a sort of responsibility to stop the spread of misinformation and pseudoscience. Even though being an expert on the flu vaccine or essential oils doesn’t fall within my job description as a chemist, I have the skills to look up literature and legitimately sourced articles on these topics. I also have the skills to communicate the research conclusions in a way my friends’ moms and old classmates can understand. Though these posts are frustrating, they are great opportunities to show how to become a better critical thinker and become more scientifically literate.
Every time I take a few minutes or a hour to research how to debunk a post, I hope that these friends will listen to me, someone they know and trust, rather than someone they might shrug off as trying to subjugate the public to elaborate lies. I replied to Mrs. Oliver, a high school teacher of mine and the author of the original flu shot post above:
“Someone upthread mentioned that the stomach flu is unrelated to the actual flu, and they were right. Additionally, the flu shot cannot give you the flu because it has a) flu viruses that have been killed and are therefore not infectious or b) proteins from the flu virus instead of the viruses themselves, depending on the formulation.
“From the CDC website, side effects that the flu shot may give you: ‘Rarely, people who get the flu shot have fever, muscle pain, and feelings of discomfort or weakness. If experienced at all, these effects usually last for 1-2 days after vaccination, and are much less severe than actual flu illness.’
“Props to you for getting the vaccine this season! I hope this does not discourage you from getting it again next year. I’ve gotten it every year and have never gotten flu-like symptoms. Besides protecting yourself, you’re also protecting those around you who can’t get the flu shot or are more vulnerable to the flu, like children, the elderly, and those with chronic illnesses. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/flushot.htm”
Mrs. Oliver responded positively to my comment. “Thanks Britt!” she replied. “I always trusted you. You were the one who told me about apple cider vinegar when you were in my class!” Though I had to quickly educate myself on apple cider vinegar literature and clarify that I have never and likely will never be a proponent of the purported health effects of apple cider vinegar, her positive reply was encouraging and rewarding.
Though the circumstances for the interaction are often discouraging, I value each opportunity to interact with people as not just their friend, but as a “scientist.” It’s special to take on the responsibility of building trust in scientists and research, especially in this unconventional way.
Short answers
Why are you, as a scientist or engineer, interested in participating in this program?
Even as a child, I wanted to tell stories. I loved writing and scribbled down short stories and novels throughout my childhood and adolescence.
Just last week, I read through my stories from high school and college and found that it’s probably a good thing I didn’t seek to carve out a living as a novelist. While I was good at making the words sound compelling, I was absolutely terrible at coming up with a convincing plot.
In college, I majored in both English and chemistry. As I gained more lab research experience, I found that the most valuable skills I learned from my English degree turned out not to be from my fiction writing or screenwriting classes, as I thought they would be. Instead, the skills I learned in my technical and scientific writing classes have become the skills that most distinguish me from my scientific peers. After gaining freelance experience at scientific magazines and investigating careers that include scientific communication, I realized that I should have gone to journalism school in undergrad, though I didn’t know that at the time.
To gain journalistic training, I’ve recently taken a science journalism course through the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. The course reminded me how much I enjoy writing and enjoy finding ways to improve as a writer. I’m interested in becoming a AAAS Mass Media Fellow because I want more training, more feedback, and more experience on my way to becoming a better science journalist.
What in your background has prepared you for this fellowship?
Along with my graduate science education, my diverse writing experiences and my formal training in writing have set me up with a good foundation to learn a lot from the AAAS Fellowship.
I’ve worked as a technical writer at National Academic Quiz Tournaments, where I learned to gather information from primary and secondary sources, write in a clear and extremely concise format, and worked with several different subject editors to improve my writing. Since starting graduate school, I’ve written for a number of scientific magazines, including Chemical & Engineering News, Chemistry World, and most recently the Graduate and Postdoctoral Chemist Magazine, where I am a regular contributor. Learning from the variety of editors at these publications has improved my self-editing skills and made me a better writer.
In terms of formal education, I took both technical and scientific writing classes for my English degree as well as English and history classes that examined how we think and talk about science. My honors thesis in English focused on science communication; I wrote a portfolio of pieces about the results of my chemistry research thesis in several different genres for different target audiences.
I’ve also recently taken a scientific journalism class in Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Working with Prof. Patti Wolter and editor Becky Lang throughout the course has increased my confidence in my interviewing, fact-checking, narrative structure, and news writing skills and encouraged me to seek further training in science journalism through programs such as the AAAS MMF.
How do you think the skills learned from the fellowship will impact your future career or academic plans?
Throughout the last several years (and especially during the pandemic), I’ve read so many insightful pieces of science writing that make me think about the world in a new way. I have enjoyed reaching others by merging my scientific interests by writing articles for my science journalism class and freelancing for magazines. These experiences have opened my eyes to the possibility of becoming a career science journalist, whether as a freelancer or on staff at an institution or publication.
Becoming a AAAS Mass Media fellow would allow me to further hone the writing skills I have cultivated so far. I would love to get the chance to work in a newsroom for a summer and turn my full attention to pitching, interviewing, investigating, writing, and generally learning how to be a journalist. Getting guidance and support from people who have been writing and reporting for years is also an invaluable aspect of this fellowship for me. I believe the experience I would gain from the AAAS MMF would allow me to make an informed decision about what jobs and programs to apply to after graduation. This opportunity would also equip me with the skills and clips to become a good candidate for science communication positions.
Describe any activities, other than previous media experiences, you have undertaken that involved increasing public understanding of science and technology.
I’ve been participating in the Skype-A-Scientist program for the past year. I enjoy presenting my research to students of all ages and recalling what I did and did not know about the scientific process when I was their age. The students also ask incredibly thoughtful questions, which warms my heart and helps me become a better communicator. My positive experiences with Skype-A-Scientist encouraged me to reach out to my own friends and friends-of-friends to give talks and Q&A sessions during the pandemic. I’ve been able to talk to everyone from a curious kindergartener to AP Chem students from a high school with a majority of at-risk students.
With the deluge of confusing information about COVID-19, I’ve taken my role as “the only scientist on my Facebook friends’ feeds” (particularly my elderly friends) more seriously. I’ve always tried to respectfully break down the misleading claims friends have shared about flu vaccinations or alkaline diets, but this year I’ve attempted to share articles that lay out public health information in a particularly understandable way.
In more informal science outreach, I ran a “Lab Friday” series on Snapchat during my last year of college, sharing cool things I did in lab and explaining the basic principles underpinning my experiments. Originally, I only intended to show people my everyday work so they could appreciate it as much as I did, but the series ended up starting a lot of great conversations with people I would never have otherwise talked to about science.
What community outreach or educational activities have you participated in, science-related or otherwise?
It’s been my privilege to be involved with the quizbowl community, a community that shaped my passion for learning and competition during my high school and college years. Quizbowl encourages learning by going beyond the esoteric facts in bar trivia or Trivial Pursuit, asking “pyramidal” questions that move from harder clues to easier ones. This prompts students to learn real things and make real connections between figures and events in history; authors and their literary legacies; artists and artistic movements; philosophies, mythologies, and religion; and phenomena in math and science.
I’ve been able to serve the quizbowl community in several different ways. I’ve written questions for many tournaments, both through my former job at National Academic Quiz Tournaments and through house-written tournaments. In undergrad, I served as vice president of the Ohio State University Academic Team, organizing practices and tournaments for the university team as well as hosting tournaments for the Ohio high school community. I hope to have encouraged younger girls involved in this historically male-dominated activity as I’ve directed and staffed tournaments at the regional and national level. It’s thrilling to help bring such a different mode of learning to students and is especially rewarding to give back to a community that has had such a significant impact on my life.
Science writing sample
“Save the worms”: What worms can teach us about microplastics
“Save the turtles!” is a common tongue-in-cheek rallying cry for environmentalists trying to keep plastic straws and six-pack rings out of the ocean. “Save the worms!” is much less common, but studying tiny worms called C. elegans could teach us about the toxicity of microplastics—ubiquitous, microscopic pieces of plastic that come from clothing, personal care products and plastic waste.
While most microplastic research focuses on oceans and lakes, an Environmental Science & Technology study published in October 2020 studies microplastics in soil. Scientists from Brazil, Korea and Germany counted the number of worm offspring to track how microplastics affected the worms. The worms had fewer offspring when exposed to microplastics with additives, leading lead researcher Shin Woong Kim to conclude that additives contribute heavily to the toxic effects of microplastics.
Microplastics are small pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long which can be harmful to aquatic life. There are two different kinds of microplastics: primary and secondary. Primary microplastics are manufactured on purpose and include microbeads in exfoliating body washes, abrasives in toothpastes or particles that allow for the timed release of fertilizer. Because these small plastics can escape water filters and end up in waterways where fish and other wildlife can mistake them for food, Congress passed the Microbead-Free Waters Act in 2015. This act prohibits manufacturers from using these microplastics in “rinse-off” personal care products.
Secondary microplastics are much harder to control than primary microplastics because they come from larger pieces of plastic waste. The majority of plastic waste ends up unrecycled—91.5 percent of plastics in 2018, according to data from the American Chemistry Council—resulting in millions of tons of plastic waste that can degrade into smaller microplastic particles. The increased surface area of tiny microplastic particles is perfect for absorbing persistent pollutants and toxic heavy metals, which can accumulate in the digestive tracts of organisms that consume microplastics.
In the recent C. elegans microplastics study, the researchers focused on another source of toxic pollutants associated with microplastics: chemical additives inside the plastic particles themselves. Manufacturers use additives and precursors to manufacture plastics with certain properties—for example, bisphenol A (BPA)-based linings for aluminum cans resist the acidity of Campbell’s tomato soups in ways some BPA replacements can’t, according to Food Dive. But these additives are sometimes harmful; BPA can mimic estrogen and interfere with many body processes, causing cancer, early puberty, and many other problems.
Kim and the research team tested the toxicity of soil containing both regular secondary microplastics and microplastics that had been soaked in ethanol to remove their additives. The researchers found the additive-extracted microplastics were less harmful to the worms than the original microplastic particles. When they extracted the microplastics twice, researchers found no difference between worm reproduction rates in microplastic-contaminated soil and clean soil. Previous microplastic studies have suggested that the size, shape, and type of plastic of the microplastic particles might affect their toxicity, but the double-extracted microplastics showed the same non-toxic effect across all shapes, amounts and plastic types, suggesting that microplastics’ extractable additives are the main driver of microplastic toxicity.
The researchers also mimicked rain cycles that could cause the microplastic additives to leach into the soil. They observed increasing toxicity over time, which leveled off after two and a half weeks. These results show that toxicity effects can appear after several days (a longer time period than some microplastic toxicity testing protocols) and can accumulate from concentrations of microplastics as low as 0.001 percent by weight. Because scientists are still trying to understand how microplastics in the soil affect nematode worms, these findings will influence how researchers design microplastic toxicity soil tests in the future.
What can you do about microplastics if you’re not a C. elegans worm? Your laundry can be a significant source of microplastics; over 1 million microfibers can be released in one load. Wearing clothes made with natural fibers like cotton and buying fewer synthetic-fiber clothes like fleece jackets can help decrease your microplastic impact. Air-drying clothes is also better than using the dryer, which loosens clothing’s fibers. Reducing your single-use plastics usage also helps, but change will need to happen on larger levels to be effective. For example, the U.S. recycles only 9 percent of its plastics every year. Moving to expanded plastic recycling programs and plastic-less or more easily recyclable packaging can begin to truly reduce microplastics and their impact.
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THE MODERN PROMETHEUS: PFAS Compounds and Their Unintended Consequences
Humanity has created a Frankenstein’s monster of molecules: a class of synthetic compounds that never would have existed without human intervention and has now overpowered its human creators.
This class of fluorinated, toxic pollutants called per- and polyfluoroalkylated substances, or PFAS, has been linked to reproductive issues, decreased immune responses, kidney and liver diseases, and many kinds of cancer. And it’s ubiquitous — studies show PFAS is present in the blood of more than 98% of Americans.
Though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has not yet legally recognized PFAS as hazardous substances, it has recognized the need to destroy these compounds. In September 2020, the EPA issued a challenge on “Innovative Ways to Destroy PFAS.” It has only been a couple decades since we realized that PFAS threatens both us and our environment, but scientists are developing a better understanding of both the monster and what it will take to bring it down.
IN THE BEGINNING
In 1938, DuPont scientists accidentally discovered polytetrafluoroethylene, a polymer that DuPont would later market as Teflon. To help process Teflon, 3M and DuPont developed a molecule called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), one of the first PFAS compounds.
Before the late 1990s, scientists outside of industry didn’t know much about PFAS. Companies like 3M and DuPont did most of the research on them, and under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, as long as the companies didn’t report probable health concerns linked to the compounds, the EPA couldn’t regulate them.
But in 1998, lawyer Robert Bilott took a call from Wilbur Tennant, a farmer from Parkersburg, West Virginia. Tennant’s cows were developing strange organ discolorations and dying, and Tennant suspected it had to do with the sudsy green water the neighboring DuPont chemical plant was discharging into the creek next to his property.
As the 2019 movie Dark Waters details, this phone call led to Bilott’s landmark set of lawsuits revealing that for decades, DuPont had actively covered up the findings of its own internal studies showing that PFOA had extremely harmful health effects — all while continuing to improperly dispose of its PFOA waste and poison the residents of Parkersburg.
PANDORA’S BOX
In the following years, government, industrial, and academic institutions fueled an explosion of PFAS research. What we’ve learned about PFAS since then goes like this:
There are over 9,000 known PFAS compounds, each containing multiple bonds between fluorine and carbon. Fluorine, an element desperate for electrons, bonds extremely tightly to the carbons in these compounds’ backbones, forming the strongest bond in organic chemistry.
This carbon-fluorine bond is extremely useful. Because it’s hard to break, it’s good for high-heat applications like fire retardants and fire-fighting foams. Because it doesn’t want to bond to anything else, it can help achieve the perfect over-easy eggs in non-stick pans and can protect furniture from stains. The fluorines in these fluorocarbons are so hungry for electrons that they bunch together even more tightly than atoms in other molecules, forming an electron shield that makes them waterproof and grease-proof, perfect for lining pizza boxes and burger wrappers.
But these carbon-fluorine bonds rarely occur in nature; our bodies don’t know what to do with PFAS compounds when we ingest food or water contaminated with them. This leads to high rates of cancers, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and other health effects from PFAS exposure.
There aren’t environmental mechanisms to break these compounds down, either, so they’ve been circulating and accumulating in our water and environment. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) estimates that there is detectable PFAS in over 60% of Americans’ tap water. Up to 80 million of these Americans have 10 nanograms/liter (ng/L) or higher concentrations of PFAS in their water. In a 2019 congressional hearing, 3M argued that blood PFAS levels nearly 10 million times higher (almost 1 milligram/liter) are safe; other researchers from non-profits like the EWG and the Natural Resources Defense Council contend that PFAS exposure above 1-2 ng/L poses a threat to human health.
To counter this threat, the EPA has issued a challenge seeking ways to non-thermally destroy AFFF. Thermal degradation, or incineration, is a common method for destroying contaminants. However, recent data from studies at Bennington College show that an incinerator in Cohoes, New York, hasn’t been destroying the PFAS in the PFAS-containing fire-fighting foam it’s burning “so much as redistributing them into nearby poor and working-class neighborhoods.” However, if we remove incineration from our PFAS destruction arsenal, we won’t be able to destroy PFAS.
INTO THIN AIR
To avert this crisis, scientists have begun developing other strategies to degrade PFAS into less- or non-toxic products. The ultimate goal is to “mineralize” PFAS by breaking the compounds down into carbon dioxide and fluoride.
Researchers have developed a variety of different ways to attack PFAS, including electrochemical treatment, in which electricity runs through electrodes in PFAS-contaminated water and breaks down the molecules, or using radicals, chemical species that are energetic and can react with the PFAS molecules. Other methods use ultrasonically generated bubbles with high-temperature and -pressure conditions on the bubbles’ surfaces, or plasmas that create high-energy ions and electrons that react with the PFAS.
However, the effectiveness of most of these methods is limited. Some consume too much energy to be practical or are less effective in real water, where ions and other contaminants interfere with the destruction. Most of the methods don’t completely degrade PFAS, instead creating shorter PFAS that are more mobile in soil and harder to re-filter out of water, or creating partially defluorinated PFAS that are harder to destroy than the original PFAS.
It’s a tough job to break the strongest bond in organic chemistry. It’s a tough job to replace PFAS compounds — which have woven themselves into our modern lives in good ways and bad — and undo the damage they’ve done to us and our environment. Unlike Frankenstein’s story, the PFAS monster will not die off by itself; its creators will find a way to destroy it.