EPI19 – The Early Career Voice

Engaging in the Conversation of Science: Its Time for You to Take an Active Role

March 13, 2019March 28, 2019 Allison Webel, PhD

Every day, headlines scream about cures, causes of disease, and questionable scientific advances. While many health reporters work hard to get the science right and translate it into something digestible for the public, they are still subject to pressures that can lead to less than precise articles. And once a scientific paper or abstract finds its way on to social media, the “facts” can be distorted into something barely resembling the original results, leaving scientists and the authors of the paper cringing. Given the speed of information-sharing today and the resulting imprecision, NOW is the time for all scientists (including early career scientists) to actively engage the lay public in the conversation of science through all means possible – even social media.

This was the topic of the early morning, early career presentation Bailey DeBarmore and I gave at the 2019 AHA EPI Lifestyle Scientific Sessions. To be honest, using social media to disseminate my science was definitely not something I learned in graduate school. In fact, my first exposure to blogging was through the TV character Barney Stinson, and for most of the past 15 years, I thought blogging was typically superficial and shameless. However, recently I have seen (and used) its immense power to share my own science. These experiences convinced me that social media may be one of the powerful tools we have to actively engaging and shaping in the conversation of science.

Whether or not scientists should blog has been hotly debated. In 2018, Eryn Brown and Chris Woolston published a persuasive article on why science blogging matters in Nature. They list a number of benefits to blogging including furthering one’s career, recruiting more bright minds to science, creating a new community of scientists, and it can further the reach and understanding of science (by both the public and often by the scientist herself). Those are significant reasons to write a science blog. But, if you’re someone like me and didn’t really understand what blogging was, you may be wondering how to start. There are several ways to get started writing science blogs:

Write your own. Brown and Woolston mention a several blogs started by scientists including Small Pond Science. This is a viable option, and there are a number of books and companies ready to help anyone start to blog for a fee. However, it can be a lot of work. Not only will you have to create the content, you will need to create and maintain the website, as well. Depending on your experience with website creation, you may not want this to be your first foray into science blogging.
Work with your professional organization. Many professional organizations including the American Heart Association, The American College of Sports Medicine, and the American Society for Nutrition have active blogs. And all blogs need one thing to stay relevant – content. As professional organizations have recognized the power of social media and blogging to advance their noble goals, they have increasingly worked with their members to help develop and promote accurate, timely, and engaging blogs. Some, like the American Heart Association and the American Society for Nutrition, have formal programs that provide both the blogging platform and training to help improve the quality and reach of the blog. (See links above to learn more about these great programs)
Collaborate with your journal editors. Increasingly, journals are offering authors the opportunity to create video abstracts, blogs, and podcasts on their accepted manuscripts. While it may seem like one more tedious or abstract thing to do, these can be highly engaging mediums on which to share your work. After all, if you’ve just spent years working on a research study that has somehow been condensed to 8 single-spaced pages, don’t you want that paper to have the maximal amount of impact?

Hopefully by now you’re convinced that that science blogging can be a helpful tool and want to see how you can test it out yourself. But science bloggers are [often] not paid, and if something is going to take away from your teaching, patient care, grant writing and manuscript writing time, then there needs to be a way to derive academic benefit from it. We need metrics – specifically metrics that your promotion and tenure committee can appreciate. So I’ll conclude with a couple of tips for benefiting from blog writing.

Put your blogs on your CV. Edge for Scholars has great advice for how to cite a blog post on your CV (note they also publish some great early career academic blogs, as well).
Get your analytics (page views, geographic reach of your blog, number of times shared) and use them. You can include your analytics in your CV and also use them to highlight the reach of your science and your national and international impact on your 3- and 5- reviews.

If you like this blog or have any questions, let me know. I’d also love for you to share some of your science blogs with me on twitter at @AllisonWebelPhD and tell me how they helped you better engage in the conversation of science. Happy Writing!

Putting Together The Pieces of Genes, Behavior, and Environment

March 11, 2019March 4, 2022 Bailey DeBarmore

The theme of this year’s #EPILifestyle19 conference was “Genes, Behavior, Environment: Putting the Pieces Together.” The three speakers in the first session, Dr Eric Boerwinkle, Dr Leslie Lytle, and Dr Michael Jerrett presented a cohesive program truly reflecting putting the pieces together.

Dr Eric Boerwinkle genetic researcher, dean, and chair of public health at the UTHealth School of Public Health, kicked things off with a hearty welcome to Houston, and applauding the audience for braving the city during the annual Houston Rodeo. Dr. Boerwinkle’s talk was marked by sincerity and focused passion for precision health and precision prevention – terms to replace “precision medicine” – that mirrors the AHA’s focus on cardiovascular health over cardiovascular disease.

He highlighted that genetics, environment, and lifestyle behaviors can be envisioned in several ways, depending on perspective and discipline. A key challenge in producing science focused on fitting these pieces together is measurement. Variables are often measured separately and differently across disciplines, and no matter the metaphor, Boerwinkle encouraged the audience to step out of their silos and begin measuring key variables together. Dr Leslie Lytle of UNC Chapel Hill Gillings School of Public Health provided a concrete example with the ADOPT project for obesity treatment, which identified high-priority measures to measure across biology, behavior, psychosocial, and environmental processes.

Transitioning from genetics to lifestyle behaviors, Boerwinkle highlighted research finding that even in genetically high-risk patients, modifying environmental factors and lifestyle behaviors can lower risk.

Dr. Leslie Lytle, professor in the department of Health Behavior at UNC Chapel Hill, situated her talk in the puzzle piece landscape by contrasting the NIH’s position on the importance of intervention research with the dismal percent of funding dollars that actually go towards intervention research.

unsplash by yusuf evli

After emphasizing the importance of intervention research to address the lifestyle and behavioral challenges of poor cardiovascular health, particularly obesity, Dr. Lytle showed us what intervention research should look like and what it can accomplish. Combining environment-level interventions based on socioecological models with individual level education can effect change, like in in the CATCH intervention, which involved child-level education, positive social modeling, and healthy changes in physical activity and school meals.

Over the past few years, the “exposome” concept has only gained popularity, along with the “-omics” trend. Wrapping up the themed session with environmental factors, Dr Michael Jerrett of UCLA School of Public Health taught us about characterizing the exposome by incorporating hyper-spatiotemporal components into research to assign exposure. What are hyper-spatiotemporal components? These components measure where people go during the day, what the pollution level is there, what they are doing and how it affects their exposure (walking in a park, biking behind a diesel truck, sitting in a car).

unsplash by adrian williams

Jerrett highlighted several studies examining these concepts, comparing the inhaled pollutants when biking, walking, or commuting by car to work in various areas of a city. How can we measure these spatiotemporal components in a “ubicomp” (ubiquitous computing) environment? Jerrett broke down the inside of our smart phones, calling attention to the numerous sensors present in nearly every smart phone and the research possibilities to harness these.

3 Tips for Live Tweeting a Conference

February 7, 2019March 28, 2019 Bailey DeBarmore

What is Live Tweeting?

Live tweeting is when you tweet about an event while you’re there.

You can harness conference hashtags, like #EpiLifestyle19 for the upcoming Epi | Lifestyle Scientific Sessions in Houston, or this past year’s #AHA18 Scientific Sessions in Chicago, to group your tweets with others and help people follow along.

Live tweeting doesn’t mean typing out every word a speaker is saying.

Tweet the name of the presentation and the speaker, the energy of the room, or your big takeaway.

What’s the “so what?” behind the presentation? What did you find most interesting?

You also don’t have to tweet in the moment.

Write down some of your thoughts, and after the session, write up your summary tweet.

Why Live Tweet?

Tweeting short comments at a conference presentation or seminar let’s your followers tune in, like they’re sitting there with you.

In an article for PLOS Blogs, Atif Kukaswadia (@DrEpid) shares an impressive example from the 2011 2^nd National Obesity Summit in Montreal.

The conference had 800 attendees, and only a handful of people tweeted.

But those handful of people produced 500 tweets with the conference hashtag, and those 500 tweets reached 80,000 people.

80,000 people.

Can you imagine how many people we’d reach at a bigger AHA conference with meeting reporters live tweeting from nearly every session?

Not only does live tweeting make followers feel like they’re there, but it stimulates discussion as people comment, asking questions, offering their own thoughts, and connecting to other science resources.

In his article “The Challenges of Conference Blogging”, Daniel MacArthur reminded us of the purpose of presenting science at conferences.

Why do we do it?

To promote discussion about our science.

To expand our own influence for future job opportunities and collaborations.

Live tweeting at conferences achieves these things – with the added benefit of concise science communication that expands both the reach of the science but also the understanding.

Tips for Live Tweeting

Live tweeting doesn’t have to be a play-by-play of the talk. Don’t worry about tweeting every single word. Instead, think about what theme or finding resonates the most with you. Tweet about that!
Visuals make any tweet that much more engaging. Use high quality, free stock photos from unsplash.com or www.rawpixel.com along with your post, or search online for a corresponding paper or faculty webpage to link in. Many people snap a pic of the slides or the speaker on stage – just be sure to check with conference policies before posting photos.
Search for the speaker on Twitter so you can tag them with their handle (preceded by @). One of the best ways to do this is to use a search engine with their full name, and “Twitter”. If nothing comes up, try tagging their institution. Many schools of medicine, hospital departments, and universities have Twitter accounts. If you know you’ll be reporting on a session in advance, you can look up these handles beforehand.

For examples of live tweets, search previous conference hashtags on Twitter, like #AHA18, #EpiLifestyle18, #QCOR18, or your council’s Scientific Sessions hashtag.

To learn more about using social media for science communication, with more tips for tweeting and blogging, be sure to come to the Epi Early Career session on Friday March 8^th, 7 – 8:30 am in the Galleria Ballroom, Westin Galleria, Houston, TX at Epi | Lifestyles Scientific Sessions 2019.