"Let's talk, let's ta-a-alk"

Well I feel like they're talking in a language I don't speak
And they're talking it to me
(Coldplay, "Talk")

I use that lyrical snippet in a presentation I give to incoming graduate students about the importance of public relations. That may sound presumptuous, but my goal is practical.

I encourage students to learn how to convey their research in a media/public-friendly way and seize any opportunity they have to get involved in crafting a press release or working with the media. Plus, it's fun. (For proof, watch graduate student Naveen Sinha cook.)

Communicating with clarity and creativity helps with securing funding, collaborating with other faculty and researchers, teaching, and explaining to parents, friends, partners, or anyone who played a role in supporting the academic journey, exactly what it means to work on meta-materials or Solid Oxide Fuel Cells or control theory.

Erez Lieberman '10 is a media maven.

To drive home the point I use my best exemplars, like dynamo Erez Lieberman '10 (Ph.D.). I just finished up yet another photo shoot with him for a future piece in Nature on 'culturomics'.

The photographer took me aside and said, "Wow, this guy's like a genius and I think I actually understand what he does!"

Admittedly, I have my own (and the school's) interests also at heart. I want a student to contact my office well before s/he ends up quoted in the New York Times or appears as a talking head on CNN waxing poetically about an innovation in synthetic biology that could unleash the apocalypse. As our dean recently said, "I am a handler" (or better, a worrier.)

Nanobristles "hugging" a polystyrene ball

Perhaps my favorite example to help inspire students who are more comfortable in the lab than the studio comes from biomimetics pioneer Joanna Aizenberg.

She uses imagery to convey the power and beauty of engineering and champions the importance of basic research for its own sake. Her sense of humor helps too.

Here's a passage from a profile I wrote of her.

As for showing value, she described her self-assembled bristles as “a unique structure reminiscent of modern dreadlocks or mythical Medusa” and invited comparisons to the Andy Francis Cutti sculpture “The Kiss” (two intertwined slabs carved from a granite staircase). She ended her chat with [NPR's Ira] Flatow by suggesting that a fantastic use of the nanobristles was “just to hang them on the wall.”

Aizenberg, in fact, makes it a point for everyone on her team to learn how to communicate well, even when writing fairly technical papers. One of her current postdoctoral students even wrote an article for one of our newsletters.

Others adopt different means to convey their work like photography (see below) or video.

Grad student Katie Hoffman's bot has lots of legs.

Of course, not every researcher will end up being the next Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of NOVA, or Lisa Randall, a physicist who makes extra dimensions somehow make sense. (And hey, both Tyson and Randall have Harvard degrees!)

That's not the point, unless a student does want to end up hosting a television show, like Harvard Design School grad Danny Forester.

Learning how to explain, say, a key advance in nanowires in a way that anyone other than an electrical engineer can understand, takes practice. Students are not without resources.

• At SEAS, we co-host a short course with science writer Cornelia Dean.
• Through MRSEC/NSEC we host an annual holiday lecture for kids (and I know the organizers are always looking for help in finding ways to make science accessible to tweens and pre-tweens.)
• At Harvard Extension, stem cell expert Bill Anderson teaches "Newsworthy Topics in Contemporary Life Sciences." (I took this course, and as a warning, it is not light on the science---there are real tests.)
• At HMS, Ph.D. students run Science in the News.
• The Center for Astrophysics used to (and may still) run science movie nights. We hosted a similar event at SEAS (exploring nanotechnology and Red Dwarf and robotics and Transformers.)
• HarvardScience collects the various releases issued by the Harvard public relations offices.

Moreover, as journalism is in a free fall of sorts, those who actually conduct the research may be more and more responsible for explaining it (and thus, justifying its value to the public).

Kit Parker with VP Joe Biden!

The payoff can be huge, as in the case of our own Kit Parker, who has pushed research on traumatic brain injury in part by being so fantastic at getting people on board like former congressman Patrick Kennedy and Vice President Joe Biden.

And no doubt, L. Mahadevan attracted the attention of the MacArthur folks (they give out the "genius" awards) because of his facility in explaining the science behind the mundane, from how honey coils to how a Venus flytrap snaps.

(As an aside, he also won a 2007 Ig Nobel award for the study of wrinkle patterns on sheets. Mahadevan took it in stride, saying, "there's no reason good science can't be fun.")

Michael Brenner, an applied mathematician at SEAS (who somehow also found the time to co-teach and co-create "Science and Cooking" last year), offers an axiom that is worthy of a refrigerator magnet (well, the kind of magnet that would be stuck on a fridge in a lab near a favorite printout from xkcd or Piled Higher and Deeper).

If you really understand something in science, you can describe it in a sentence as precise as an equation. It’s as simple as that.