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tags: kevin
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# MDF Interview Emily News story

Emily is a Media & Design Fellow in MCB and a 4th year PhD student in Cellular and Molecular Biology, where she works at the intersection of evolution and genetics in the developmental genes of insects. Over the course of the academic year, Emily designed many kinds of workshops for a wide array courses, primarily introducing students to the shifting fundamentals and emerging possibilities of scientific communication. She led many individual meetings for several different classes, including a first-year neurobiology course, a freshman seminar on speciation, an upper-level mixed year course in SCRB (Stem Cell Regenerative Biology), as well as a session with The Harvard Museum of Natural History.

In the broadest sense, Emily’s work focused on *audience* and developing communication skills specifically targeted to and appropriate for those diverse audiences. This included creating non-technical explainer videos for general audiences on “hot topics in stem cell biology,” reassessing the organization of oral presentations, building physical models out of paper and using overhead cameras to elucidate scientific concepts, and exploring the design of highly technical posters for research conferences.

In one workshop, students were divided into four groups at four stations in the Learning Lab and were tasked with breaking down a complex academic article into four sections (introduction, evidence, analysis, conclusion), each of which they represented visually before presenting the material and exposition on the green screen. This workshop emphasized the importance of efficient communication and instructed the students in the principles of basic graphic design. The students learned (and learned from) the importance of structure: how might audio components work?, if they are used, then how best to break up the visuals for order and narrative?, or, if the material is more static, how to organize the intricate information as clearly as possible? In essence, this workshop focused on creating the best possible media for situations where there is a *lot* of complex information and data to take in, using large tables, making new figures, and animating material through motion on camera.

In addition to supporting these several courses, Emily also worked with a program called Science Education Partners [add some context here]. Their postdocs and grad students visited the Learning Lab for a day of hands-on activities centered on the generation of *narrative*, creating videos about panther worms for middle school students. All of these workshops, particularly with MCB 291 (on genetics genomics and evolutionary biology), involved learning skills and necessary tools, working with and contrasting Illustrator and Bio Render, for example, designing graphical abstracts, introducing scientists to essential and canonical methods, and creating resource guides to other programs and applications, all of which, in addition to teaching these necessary models and applications that the students will constantly encounter moving forward, helped the students to learn more course material and to think about it differently and rigorously.

The workshops focused on what is useful, effective, and efficient, but the *process* itself also exfoliated more layers of the content, leading the participants to understand further, introducing an extra, meta layer to see how the work is all put together — that is, the sessions led the students to think about thinking. A particularly impactful moment for Emily occurred during a poster making workshop: “We saw something really beautiful in that workshop. For example, we had the students take the research they were making the poster for, break it down on sheets of paper and draw arrows connecting which points were relating to one another; this functioned as a stepping stone to thinking about what the layout of the poster should be, and there was a moment where one of the students just flipped the paper from horizontal to vertical and then the whole thing, the macrostructure of all the research, was suddenly illuminated for him. So these seemingly simple activities, just with markers, paper, and other materials, utilized in ways quite different from reading or a lecture or discussion in class, opened up a whole new way of thinking about it for that student.”

The mechanics of communication explored in these workshops consistently opened onto something deeper, becoming dynamic and deeply elucidating for the participants. Through her work this year, Emily not only learned specific tools and techniques related to scientific communication, becoming more comfortable jumping into Adobe Suite and using multimodal methods of presentation, she also gained a deeper appreciation for how different media can impact student learning. “I was so thrilled and somewhat surprised to see how the students learned so *differently* with the different media, and I super excited to work with STEM courses here in the future! At all different levels!”