Libby Cowgill is a biological anthropologist interested in human adaptation to climate, bone's response to exercise and late human evolution. At the Alan Alda workshop, Dr. Cowgill learned different techniques that are helpful for communicating science content to a non scientific audience.
Jan. 27, 2025
Most professional development events start with team building activities. You know the ones — they might involve some silly vocal exercises similar what actors do to warm up before a stage performance, or maybe “trust falls” to get the group out of their comfort zones and open to what the day might bring.
Many of us dread doing anything that requires us to “put ourselves out there,” but last semester, 18 Mizzou researchers volunteered to do a two-day workshop full of these types of group activities for one purpose: learn how to better communicate their research.
Libby Cowgill, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts Science, brought the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science workshop to Mizzou in November as part of an NSF grant she was awarded. The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, housed at Stony Brook University in New York, offers professional development programs designed to help researchers learn how to better explain their work. The Alda method combines the latest social science research and applied improvisational exercises to support researchers as they develop communication strategies that work for them.
“This workshop was fantastic!” said Candy Sall, director of the Museum of Anthropology. “We learned how to prepare our communication for different audiences, and how to get and keep attention while sharing important information. Now we can demonstrate this to our students too.”
We sat down with Dr. Cowgill to learn more about the event and how she’ll be using what she learned in her work going forward.
How did the Alan Alda workshop come to be at MU?
I applied for a grant during COVID that included attending an Alda Center course as part of my professional development activities. During that time the Alda Center was offering some courses for individuals (not groups) online, but by the time I got the grant, they had transitioned back to all in-person group classes for the class that I really wanted to take. So, I was left with a small pot of money just for me to take the class, but no way to take the class. I then contacted several folks to see if they wanted to contribute. Ultimately, we were able to do the workshop thanks to the contributions of the College of Arts & Science, the anthropology department, The Connector, and The Evolution, Science, and Society group.
What was the workshop like? What sorts of activities did you all do?
In the beginning, we really had to trust the instructors — it wasn't always exactly clear how the activities would lead to better science communication! For example, one of the exercises was to pair up and "rant" about something to a partner. In the first round, the partner's job was to respond to everything you said with "no, but..." In the second round, you ranted again, and they responded with "yes, and..." It ended up being a terrific exercise for teaching us how to respond to people in our audience, even if they might be arguing with us or not getting the point of the talk. Just responding to someone with "yes, and..." instead of "no, but..." (even if you are saying mostly the same things after that) completely changes the feel of the conversation.
Many of the other activities had more intuitive connections to how we communicate science. We worked on one-minute synopses of our work, which is sometimes all the time you have to get across the gist of your research to a donor or other important person. We also worked on using narrative in our talks to capture audience attention — starting with a story is an incredibly effective way to teach science. Overall, it was an action-packed two days with not a minute wasted, yet we all had such a great time that it seemed to go by quickly.
Why did you specifically want to invest in your professional development regarding science communication? How is improving your science communication helpful to your research?
If you cannot articulate your work to the public and to colleagues who may not be specialists in your area, you are missing half the point of the work itself! Particularly for people who receive funding from federal mechanisms using taxpayer money, it's essential that you give talks and reach out to the public to convey the results of your findings.
It also helps the research — the questions and concerns that folks outside of academia have about your research can inform the direction of your work going forward. In my past work, I've had audience members ask some very astute questions about human fossils that had never occured to me before, because they were seeing the fossil evidence with a fresh perspective. I've gone on to work on answering the very questions that rose during the Q&A session after a talk.
What aspect or session of the workshop was most helpful to you?
We worked on our "spiel" about our research on several different time frames — what will you say you about your work if you only have a minute? How about five minutes? This is actually a pretty challenging skill — particularly for young faculty or for people just starting new research avenues. Afterward we received feedback from our peers and the instructors on our research spiel. I'm starting a new area of work and hadn't given much thought on how to do this. It was such a useful exercise.
Have you incorporated anything you learned into your work?
Absolutely. I'm going to start giving my first talks on the new research area that I am exploring this spring. I'm currently exploring how body type influences how humans respond to very cold and very warm temperatures using physiological data from participants exposed to different temperatures in a climate chamber. I will incorporate the storytelling technique I learned at Alan Alda when I talk about this work.
During the course, I came up with a great introductory narrative about what it must have been like for early humans in the past to deal with extreme cold and heat without the technology we have today. I think it was a great "hook" to pull people into thinking about how the body copes with temperature extremes.