Cottrell Scholars Gather for 30th Annual Conference
Research Corporation for Science Advancement’s Cottrell Scholar community gathered July 17-19 in Tucson, Arizona, to welcome new members and celebrate the 30th year of a program that has grown in diversity and impact since its inception in 1994.
“This is a passionate community, blended from multiple disciplines at research institutions and primarily undergraduate institutions, whose members learn from each other at every stage of their careers,” said RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco, who leads the program.
Ronco said the 120+ conference attendees included one participant from the first gathering: CS 1994 Bradley Smith, University of Notre Dame. Today the community numbers more than 500 and includes Cottrell Scholars, Fulbright-Cottrell Scholars, and recipients of RCSA’s Robert Holland Jr. Award.
The theme of this year’s conference, co-chaired by CS 1999 Karen Bjorkman, University of Toledo, and CS 2016 Scott Shaw, University of Iowa, was “Inclusive Science Communication: Making Science ‘Make Sense’ for Everybody.” As with every conference, participants met to network, welcome new members, and share ideas for collaborative projects with potential for national impact in science, academia, or society at large.
"There's a dearth of good communication right now in the world, as we all know, and communication in particular about science has become incredibly important,” said Bjorkman. “But good communication needs to reach everyone, not just other scientists and not just people in our universities. Everyone needs to understand the importance of science, the contributions of science, and the things that science brings to the table.”
The first order of business at the conference was to welcome the new class of Cottrell Scholars.
RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer noted that the 2024 class started their faculty careers on the cusp of the COVID pandemic, facing multiple disruptions including the closing of research laboratories, the sudden shift to online teaching, institutional hiring freezes, and extraordinary challenges to student well-being and learning.
“We salute your achievements and your resilience,” he told the new awardees. “You join a community that likes a challenge, a community that cares not just about research but about education, culture, leadership, how science is perceived throughout the country, and our ability to make a positive difference in higher education and in the world.”
The 2024 class, early career scholars in chemistry, physics, and astronomy at institutions across the United States and Canada, gave five-minute talks detailing their educational plans.
CS 1997 Adam Falk, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, gave the conference keynote presentation, “For Scientists, There’s No Escaping Culture.”
Falk said understanding the role culture plays in communication and learning to talk about science without alienating other people is necessary to bridge the cultural divides that are driving anti-science sentiment and attacks on academic freedom.
“We in science spend more time thinking about what we are going to say than thinking about how our words will land or listening to other people,” he said. “Retreating into your own expertise is the opposite of what you need to do.”
It’s the opposite of inclusion, too, he added.
“There are some things that as scientists we need to recognize are often part of our own cultural background,” he said. “Our understanding of what is true and how you get there can be considered alienating and arrogant to others .... We can be uneasy in showing vulnerability, uncertainty, naivete, and curiosity.”
The bottom line, he said, is “we have to bring our full selves, all of who we are, into our communicating around science, and we have to make room for the full selves of our audience.”
The 2024 cohort of Holland awardees also gave brief talks about their work and the different approaches to increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM that they have used in their careers.
Marcel Agüeros, Columbia University, talked about his experiences generating excitement about stellar astrophysics among elementary and high school students, and the successes of programs that are helping underrepresented undergraduates and postbacs advance in STEM.
Jorge López, University of Texas, El Paso, highlighted his own exploration of the role of research mentoring in science education, and data showing the importance of participating in research as a way to increase the number of students who graduate with bachelors’ degrees in physics and continue on to Ph.D. studies.
Nadya Mason, University of Chicago, shared her insights on how to have the most impact on DEI with limited time and competing demands. She tries to balance broad-reaching activities with informal but high-impact individual mentoring of underrepresented undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty.
Leyte Winfield, Spelman College, talked about her work advancing Black women in STEM, including a recently launched cosmetic science program that aims to advance scientific research related to ethnic hair and skin care products while giving students research experience and opening up career development pathways in the beauty industry.
The conference also featured talks by winners of this year’s STAR and IMPACT Awards, which encourage academic leadership excellence and the improvement of science education by Cottrell Scholars.
IMPACT awardee CS 2009 Rory Waterman, University of Vermont, urged Cottrell Scholars to engage more actively in the fight against mistrust in science, which is having a negative impact on education across the country.
“When our DEI programs get dismantled, we don't get to choose who works in our labs anymore,” he said. “We don't get the ability to create the 21st century representative workforce that we want.”
Among his solutions: talking more about how much science has yet to do and learn, talking about the human beings who do science and their successes, and talking about the direct benefits of science to people’s lives.
In her IMPACT Award presentation, CS 2009 Maura McLaughlin, West Virginia University, highlighted the way her original CS educational program to involve high school students in pulsar searching has not just helped improve diversity and retention of undergraduates at WVU but has contributed important data and discoveries used in the NANOGrav collaboration’s recent findings on gravitational wave background.
She said saying yes to new projects has led her career in sometimes unexpected directions, and that she has learned way more from failures than successes along the way.
“Follow your passions, and build on your strengths,” she said. “Your success doesn’t need to look like everybody else’s.”
STAR Award winner CS 1997 Mark Moldwin, University of Michigan, talked about his career as a space physicist and the ways he has blended his faculty roles in research, education, and institution building.
Though he likes solving complex institutional problems and developing structures to enable systemic change, he said he loves being a professor integrating teaching and research, and mentoring students in the classroom and lab.
“To find balance in your work, know your values,” he said. “You can have deep impact as a teacher.”
