At Biosphere 2, our science is essentially done in public. Every time I’m in the water checking on our clams and the sensors around them, I’m in view of the public and essentially an attraction for the public to watch. This is a really unique way to do science unlike any of my past experience, when I’ve been out in the field with a collaborator, or in the lab with a laboratory technician. I was initially intimidated by the idea of doing my science with an audience, but I’ve decided to lean into it as a huge opportunity. It is rare that the public gets to see all the steps going into our science; they usually only see the end of the story and not the whole journey leading up to that point. So recently I participated in two new ways of sharing my work while it’s in progress with the public.

The first was a collaboration with Mari Clevin, a videographer with the University of Arizona who made a really nice profile of my crazy clam journey. It was a lot of fun showing her around B2, trying to capture what it’s like to work here. It was fascinating seeing how all her footage and interviews came together into a video, and how she captured the key points of our conversation into a narrative!

The other scicomm event I participated in was a “Research Show and Tell” event run by the PAGES Early Career Network. Early Career Researchers include PhD students, postdoctoral researchers like me, and early career faculty. The ECN is intended to help us band together to share opportunities and plan events relevant to our interests. Among the North American regional representatives for the ECN, we saw a real need for more informal ways to share our research to an advanced audience of our peers. We’re all burned out from Zoom webinars, and on the other side Zoom coffee hours don’t typically provide much opportunity to share scientific content, so there’s a real need for events in the middle. So I was excited to share my research with a group of my peers, touring them around the Biosphere, showing them my clams via pre-recorded video and then having a Q and A to describe the work. It was a lot of fun and you can watch the whole hour-long event below!