Career FAQ

What is this FAQ?

I am very lucky to have a cool and unusual career, so I get asked to do informational interviews very often. Because I get so many requests, I think it’s more fair to offer everyone this FAQ instead of only being able to meet with a few people. I’m happy to add new questions! Please use my contact form here to suggest them.

What is it exactly that you do? What does an average week look like?

I lead the Education & Engagement Program at the Allen Institute, which I also created. The Allen Institute practices open science, releasing data, analysis tools, lab protocols, hardware schematics, cell lines, and other scientific resources freely for others to use in their work. We do outreach and professional education on those open science resources and current research. The program aims to reach educators, their students, scientists, and the public with material relevant to their teaching and research, help them learn how to use those resources through trainings and tutorials, and support the development of science skills.

I oversee the entire portfolio of teaching resource development, educator workshops, field trips, public events, scientific conference outreach, and more, as well as the team that makes all of this programming happen. I am also the principal investigator (PI) on two grants that support different areas of my work (you can read about those here and here).

One of my favorite things about my job is that there is no average day or week, though there are some seasonal patterns around conferences and the school year. I meet with the team every week to go over projects, review drafts of work, figure out what help they need from me or their teammates, brainstorm, and look ahead to upcoming projects and deadlines. I regularly meet with leaders of other teams, such as media and science teams. We coordinate and learn from each other about approaches to projects and management. I also field all suggestions and requests for new education- and training-related projects from within the team, other departments, and outside the organization, and decide what we will take on. This all means that I have a lot of meetings and spend a lot of time responding to emails, producing reports, and networking both with my colleagues and outside of the organization.

Throughout the year we run professional development workshops for educators and host field trips, which ebb and flow around the academic calendar. We also run an exhibit booth at scientific conferences to get the word out to prospective research users of the open science resources. I typically go to four or five per year myself.

I also co-lead our science communication training program for staff. I lead workshops and have developed self-paced activities for my colleagues to develop their communication skills, practice communicating with different audiences, and help their research have the greatest impact. Building this experience is how I got started doing science communication consulting on the side as well!

(Answer as of April 2025, a little before my seven-year mark at the Allen Institute.)

How did you get into science education and communication?

I got started in science communication when I was in the teen program at the Oregon Zoo, where I spent just as much of my time talking to visitors about animals, the environment, and conservation as I did taking care of the animals. However, almost all of the zoo staff who did science education or naturalist interpretation (on-grounds talking to the public in informal settings) did it on the side of their main job of animal care or were seasonal staff who went back to college or teaching during the school year, so I didn’t realize that it could be a full-time career. (To be fair, it wasn’t as much of a career path in the mid-2000s as it is now.)

I went on to a neuroscience major at Pomona College, where I was a teaching assistant for several courses, which mainly included leading study sessions and helping students when they were stuck in lab. I loved teaching in formal settings, and I entered grad school thinking I wanted to become a teaching professor at a small teaching-focused institution like Pomona. Over the course of grad school at the University of Washington, I took and then taught science communication workshops, helped lead the grad student neuroscience outreach program, and developed and taught a course of my own, as well as being a TA again for a course designed and mainly taught by someone else. I also participated in science policy training, which taught me that I did not want to go into science policy, as well as teaching me transferrable skills like writing a project brief and wrangling a distributed team.

Through all these experiences, I found that I really loved working on big projects and content development from behind the scenes, not just being in the classroom. As I approached the end of graduate school, I started looking for jobs that focused on resource development and program management, where I could continue to use my science, education, and project skills.

I came to the Allen Institute to work on training resources and programs for working scientists, as well as outreach to the scientific community via conferences about what resources the Institute had available. This work used my skills in teaching, educational resource creation, and science, but for teaching scientists rather than students, which was my original plan. The education program grew organically after that before becoming official in 2022.

Overall, I did not remotely start out planning to have my current career path, but I followed where my interests and skills could be applied and where the opportunities emerged (or where I could make them). I was also fortunate to just be in the right place at the right time with the right idea on several crucial occasions.

What is science communication (as a field) anyway?

Science communication, or “scicomm”, is a broad category that can mean a bunch of different ways we talk, write, illustrate, interpretive dance, etc. about science. (I am not joking about interpretive dance.) Generally, the goal is to engage non-scientists with science topics and (this is often overlooked) scientific thinking. It most commonly means communications that target the general public, usually adults, but also sometimes children, depending on the subfield. It can be in any format from a highly structured plan to casual and spontaneous (writing, video, audio, visual, 3D objects, formal presentations, appearances in the arts, literally just a conversation – you name it, it can be about science). Scicomm generally doesn’t mean formal education (that is, in school), science communication geared towards other scientists (such as journal articles), journalism, or science policy. Those are all considered their own fields.

One of the challenges in professional science communication is that there is no consistent terminology used for what we do or for jobs in the field. I would describe myself as both a general science communicator (as above) and a science educator (programs and content for formal educational settings and science educator professional development), but those have slightly different meanings. In contrast, I wouldn’t describe myself as a science writer, (I write about science, but science writer means people who write articles or books), science interpreter (person at a zoo or museum who works with visitors directly), or science media creator (someone who creates, edits, and maybe appears in video or audio media).

Yes, it’s confusing!

In my experience, science organizations, universities, and funders are increasingly recognizing the value of dedicated, full-time professional science communicators. However, the language used to describe these positions and the scope of the positions themselves are still very variable, which makes it difficult to find them (and for those of us in the field to find each other).

What kinds of skills do you use in your work?

As a science communicator and educator, I use many different skills related to both science and communication, and also a variety of generalizable professional skills. Some skills I depend on especially often include:

• Communication
  • Assessing my audience and figuring out what they need and want and like (and don’t like)
  • Having engaging, energetic presentation skills
  • Creating clear, concise, interesting writing and presentations (ok, maybe sometimes I’m not so concise…)
  • Breaking down a complex topic into simpler chunks, developing analogies, and helping others understand in a way that makes them feel excited to learn, not stupid for not knowing already
• Science
  • Picking up the general idea of new science concepts quickly and figuring out which details are meaningful for me and my audiences
  • Being able to read and absorb a journal article from outside my expertise
  • Understanding how to interpret different kinds of data and what they’re useful for
  • Understanding how to interpret graphs, statistics, and other quantitative information
  • Knowing a little about a lot of different topics so I can put them in context
• Working
  • Time management
  • Laying out a project management plan (for both time and tasks) and keeping the project team to those deadlines
  • Networking with colleagues and others across the field
  • Being friendly, approachable, and easy to collaborate with
  • Being dependable

Because I now lead the education program, I use some different skills now than I did when I was primarily the one out in front of audiences myself, such as:

• Managing people
• Setting and enforcing clear expectations
• Creating and sticking to a budget
• Strategic planning – and making changes to that plan based on feedback and results
• Evaluation and metrics – how do we know if we did the things we said we would
• Reporting on the program – keeping and choosing the right metrics and narratives

You’ll notice these skills are all quite general, rather than more specific things like “writing a lesson plan,” or “planning a conference booth.” Science moves quickly, as does the market for science communication and education. Everyone has this kind of broad, transferrable skill, so the important thing is to have the ability to recognize the underlying skill rather than the specific tasks.

What’s the deal with all this theater stuff?

I’ve been involved with theater since I was about four, when I played Goldilocks in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. While my foundational background was in acting, I later pivoted to behind-the-scenes positions as a stage manager and director. These days I’m mainly an audience member. As anyone who has ever done theater knows, it’s a time suck, but I still get back to projects intermittently.

My multidisciplinary theater experience informs my approach to science communication and education because the two fundamentally have many of the same goals: to engage an audience and make them think, usually working with a team, often while using complicated equipment that you have to make look easy. Also, both theater and science communication look like a one-directional delivery of material from performer/educator to audience, but both actually aim to generate long-lasting dialogue and even change the way the participants think.

What do you wish people would ask you about more often?

I get asked a lot about how my theater background informs my approach to science communication. I wish I would get asked more often about how science shows up in theater (and other pop culture/media too), like how science and scientists are portrayed on stage (and screen/page/etc.), how art can help us understand the role science plays in our lives just like any other topic or theme, and how it can change or open our minds. This was the goal of the production of Proof by David Auburn that I directed in 2017.

How do I get a job in science education or communication? What skills do you need?

There is no single right way to get into science education or communication. I came from a science research background, which is very common (probably the most common in my estimation). Others common paths are from K-12 teaching, media and journalism (especially for those more in science writing than education or communication), university administration, other fields of communication, or general nonprofit administration.

Science communication and education are not things that you would get training in or opportunities to use by default in a science career or Ph.D. program, sometimes with the exception of undergraduate teaching. If you’re interested in a career in science communication or education, you have to make a point of seeking out training and opportunities. This can be part-time, freelance, or volunteer while trying to make the transition to doing it full time, or ask your supervisors/mentors about formally building a little bit into your job (especially if volunteering/freelancing isn’t practical for your situation). You will develop your skills, start learning about the sub-fields of science communication/education that you are most interested in, build a network, develop a portfolio of projects you can talk about in a job search, and figure out whether you even enjoy it (and which subfields you like most). It’s also not enough to just be good at science communication to succeed in the field. You also have to have the workplace skills like those I described a couple questions ago.

Building experience in any subfield of science communication or education is helpful to develop your skills and learn what you’re interested in, but it does help to build that experience closer to what you want to do. In particular, classroom teaching has very particular demands and does not necessarily translate to non-classroom jobs in the field. (For example, especially in the grad student/postdoc teaching context, there is often little curriculum design autonomy, logistical duties, and/or program design involved.) Non-classroom jobs also don’t necessarily translate well to teaching.

How do I find a job in science communication?

Full-time science communication careers are increasingly emerging as organizations and funders recognize the value of having trained and dedicated professionals with specialized skills. But in the grand scheme of things, there are still few of us. Because so many candidates are interested in these jobs, having that interest in the work isn’t enough to land the job. You need a track record. These jobs also don’t necessarily use consistent terminology in the job title or description, so it can be difficult to search for them. I wish I had good advice for searching, but I don’t! Building experience and your network will help you hear about opportunities and learn what to look for.