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 🙂

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!