“I realized I imagined myself talking to my staunchest scientific critics,” said Houlton, who is now dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. “So I approached it in a conservative and calculated way. As soon as I started to overcome that obstacle, I started to outgrow that almost self-centered perspective into one that was more about outreach.”
Crystal Rogers, assistant professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine, added that she actively tries to “balance being a human and being a scientist.” As a developmental biologist, she has a colony of axolotls in her lab that she breeds and observes. The critically endangered amphibians — inspiration for Pokémon characters — have become a favorite way to share her work.
“People think they are adorable, and I realized this is a really good way to get people engaged in my science,” said Rogers, who regularly shares the antics of Chonk, the axolotl who is easily double the size of his siblings.
“I would say he’s gained me 250 to 500 Twitter followers because he’s cute and ridiculous,” Rogers added.
Social media minefield
In the news-driven landscape, social media has proved to be an important outlet for communicating science.
A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found most social media users in the U.S. reported seeing science-related posts and a third considered it an important way they get science news.
Notably, in the current environment, Facebook is the most used platform for up-to-date news about coronavirus, with 47 percent of U.S. consumers using it that way, according to a March 2020 report by market research company GlobalWebIndex.
Messages can easily be seen by multitudes of people. For example, Bill Nye the Science Guy has 6 million followers on Twitter. His posts get retweeted hundreds, if not thousands, of times. But such a following also means crafting a message for a specific audience is next to impossible.
Sanford acknowledged that any message can be misconstrued — or attacked.
“You can hope to reach your audience, and you can do what you can to put the messages you want out into the world, but once it’s out there, there’s not much you can do about where other people take it,” she said. “But if you’re willing to wade into the quagmire, I think it’s also important to be willing to go to uncomfortable places and try to have conversations.”
“Getting your name out there” has its own benefits, added Rogers. With her willingness to interact through social media, she said she has met collaborators, recruited students and received opportunities to give talks.
A 2018 study by researchers in Alberta, Canada, even suggested that science communication through social media was positively associated with more citations for scientists’ scholarly work.
Aside from personal benefits, reputable scientific profiles can help society counter the effects of unproven or irresponsible claims.
