scicomm – Mariya V. PhD

Back from #AmAnth2018, some updates!

November 18, 2018May 1, 2019MariyaKLeave a comment

What a conference! I’m always full of excitement & overwhelmed by all the knowledge after attending the American Anthropological Association annual meeting (like in 2015, for example).. and this is my 6th time!

However, this trip has been the best so far. I finished my PhD degree from ASU in May 2017 and haven’t seen most of my colleagues ever since.. until this week! I saw my friends from ASU; met with my amazing PhD mentor (Dr. Hruschka) and several other professors i’ve worked with before; caught up with my “island friends” (a group of amazing folks who spent 3 weeks with me in 2013 at an NSF-sponsored research methods camp). I even ended up on camera a couple of times!

The SciComm boom

Speaking of cameras. It all began with me looking for science communication talks and posters at the AAA. I did the same thing last year but did not succeed. THIS year I noticed a fantastic poster from the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) on engaging religious groups in science communication. And the people next to the poster actually knew about our Science Communication Journal club!! (@scicomm_jc on Twitter). There seems to have been some sort of a shift – suddenly my #scicomm work is interesting to other anthro scholars and that is amazing. That is how i ended up on the first short video interview for the AAA conference + another interview that followed (stay tuned).

In terms of the rest of the conference – it was so overwhelmingly magnificent that I can’t write down everything I enjoyed. So i made a twitter moment instead HERE. I also shared a summary of an amazing public engagement/science session on our scicommjc IGTV (see @scicommjc on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/scicommjc/ but i think IGTV videos are only visible from phone).

What else is new?

Well, we just finished a pretty impressive election project at the Center for the Study of Los Angeles, titled LA Votes. Over 100 students at over 600 polling places around LA County. More than 1,500 exit poll surveys and 600 polling place quality assessments collected. All of this in ONE DAY. This study was no joke.

Our results were then picked up by the Los Angeles Times HERE (woohoo!). Also by LA Taco HERE (weee!). And here is a snapshot from the Election Central watch-party the night of the study. You can’t even tell how exhausted we are with some of my student supervisors 🙂

With our amazing student supervisors! Election Central.

In the next couple of weeks I am also revising a paper. Feeling quite ready to now publish the third and final paper from my dissertation work! This one is extra fun because it’s my qualitative work aka fascinating in-depth interviews with Eastern Europeans and North Americans about meanings behind healthy eating styles (this stuff but the qualitative portion). Stay tuned.

Lastly, I can’t wait for Spring… because i get to teach again! I’ve missed lecturing like crazy since starting my researcher position at StudyLA, so this is a very welcome addition to a rather busy work schedule. I will be co-teaching an internship class with our center’s associate director and ALSO guest lecturing in the evolutionary psychology class. Now, the latter is pure fun, since the evolution of human food preferences is my #1 favorite topic (you know, this stuff I wrote).

That’s all for the updates, happy upcoming holidays!

Introducing: #ResearchMonday Instagram series

October 9, 2017November 20, 2017MariyaK3 Comments

Happy October!

So, in my ongoing science communication efforts, I have been experimenting with visual formats for summarizing research/complex scientific concepts in simple-to-understand and fun ways.

Thus, my #ResearchMonday series on Instagram (which, of course, features #ResearchCat). It was during the last live Twitter Chat with our Science Communication Journal Club that I realized something: participants were sharing amazing sources and articles on the topic, but I absolutely knew I was not going to read them in the nearest future considering other priorities. That’s when I wished there could be some simple memes or visual summaries of key points i’d find useful (and that would truly encourage me to read the rest of the paper).

I very much like Instagram’s swiping posts, since it’s fantastic for self-paced story telling. Thus, this is where I’ve been playing with simple overviews of research articles. Click on each to go to see them:

Note: If new to Instagram, hover over the image & note the small arrow buttons on its sides (<) and (>). Click these to swipe through the post!

So far, I’ve been choosing papers I have most expertise in- health and nutrition. However, as you can see I’ve attempted to cover some very different topics as well (conscious AI!) The format is most definitely NOT set in stone, and I’d love any feedback on improvements.

Become a Nerd of Trust: Our First Twitter Chat!

August 31, 2017August 31, 2017MariyaKLeave a comment

So this June I was invited to collaborate on a new exciting project: a Science Communication Journal Club! Since graduating in May, I already took the initiative to develop more science communication skills.. thus I joined immediately! 🎓

Screen Shot 2017-08-31 at 12.10.23 PM — Meet our team!

What is the journal club all about? From our website:

Science Communication Journal Club is aimed at easing the overwhelm associated with your science outreach responsibilities.We summarize the latest peer reviewed literature as well as reports and surveys and deliver them to you in the form of regular Twitter chats and blog articles.

This week, we had our first twitter chat, hosted by Dr. Sherry Nouraini – the club’s creator! The topic was Becoming a “Nerd of Trust” on Facebook (and we discussed this paper),

Twitter chats can be overwhelming to follow, so I also did a live video on my Instagram page 🎥. I was curious to see if this format adds anything useful, and I believe it did! If someone doesn’t have time to closely follow a busy Twitter conversation for the entire hour, they can tune into the live video while multitasking. + you can make the livestream be viewable for 24 hours! So you can always watch it a bit later.

In the livestream, I summarized the paper, and then expanded on some of the posts in the chat (as well as my own answers and interpretations of the paper). I believe it’s a great accompaniment to the chat and I plan to do the same next month!👍

Screen Shot 2017-08-31 at 12.20.18 PM.png — My Twitter/Instagram setup! I had the livestream going on my iphone, TwitterDeck on my Mac, and also opened @scicomm_jc Twitter on my iPad

Take-home points

Now, there will be a summary post on this month’s Twitter conversation soon (posted on the club’s website), but here’s my short overview:

Facebook can be a FANTASTIC intervention point to dispel scientific misconceptions, because so many people use it for news and to share articles.. many of them being poor sources. And you as a scientist have an advantage- people in your FB network actually KNOW you personally, so we’d expect they trust your expertise. And yet….. I feel like some serious barriers for scientists to use FB are:

Time commitment (indeed! the article discusses this a lot)
Cognitive burden (i stress this!! Would you rather engage the public on Twitter or your own relatives and friends?? After all, you can simply block rude individuals on Twitter and forget about them.. But things can get exhausting with family, especially on controversial topics like genetic engineering of foods)
Lack of incentives (both the paper and I emphasize this strongly). See:

I’ve been doing a lot of job applications lately, and some of them specifically ask for my Twitter account. So they surely do care whether you are engaged in science communication. Well, nobody’s going to ask you to show your personal Facebook account- so unfortunately Twitter provides you with more incentives from this perspective.

Join us for the next Twitter chat on October 3rd!

Online Health Wars: Science vs. Public

August 29, 2014August 14, 2017MariyaK1 Comment

Since my research includes asking questions about why people think what they do about health, I spent a lot of time reading various discussion boards and comment sections on different health topics. In the last several days I’ve had such an overload of insane online discussions about vaccines, GMOs, and diets that I almost want to quit… 10559827_1659644964260681_5735123775899498101_n And yet the often entertaining arguments keep me coming back! The science folks vs. lay folks debates are also interesting since I am myself an ex anti-science alternative health believer who has now “switched sides” on many issues (or as I prefer/hope to think: turned much more moderate in my views based on understanding scientific evidence better).

Have you ever seen a conversation between a “concerned mom/dad who follow their gut” and a “science proponent with experience in the lab” discussing vaccinations? It is sad and funny as you see things like these:

– science person providing links to peer-reviewed literature (really just abstracts, folks can’t access the full text most of the time), questioning parent’s credentials, attempting to explain herd immunity, claiming they lack understanding of science and suggesting to take an into to epidemiology course, blaming them for increasing rates of preventable disease…and as last resorting to calling them stupid, biased, etc.

– concerned parent shares links to blogs and anti-vaccine websites, calls the science person’s degree “useless”, emphasizes their credentials as a parent who “just knows” and does their research (via blogs and specific sites), and very often attacks the science guy/girl as being paid by Monsanto or FDA, being dogmatic and inflexible as their degree was provided by corrupt institutions, being stupid, etc.

Nobody ever appears to switch sides, understand where the other person is coming from, or take their evidence seriously. The process of reading such conversations is often sadly hilarious yet less often informative. But most importantly it shows people’s biases.

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