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7/15_chung

Anny Chung

Lobo Spotlight: Anny Chung

Student works to make science communication clearer

Anny Chung, Ph.D. student, knows that not everybody would understand cell lysis, cytokinesis and biomes offhand.
So Chung, who is in the third year of her doctorate in biology, and does understand this jargon, thinks it’s important for others to be familiar with it too.

“When you’re teaching you want your students to understand what you’re saying,” she said. “That’s pretty much the primary goal. Sometimes, when you’re looking at a slide or a textbook, you need an extra step to turn it into something that is easily digestible.”

Chung, 23, maintains a large extracurricular focus on scientific communication, the process of simplifying science explanations for nonscientists.

“It’s trying to show other people who may not be in your field what you do, why it is important and trying to help them understand,” she said. “Whatever I do, I do it every day, so I’m very entrenched in it. Someone who’s not as familiar with science would not be as familiar with the jargon.”

Three weeks ago, Chung attended a scientific communication conference sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. She was one of 50 people selected to train graduate students in scientific communication.

The application pool included 700 hopefuls, Chung said.

Born in Taiwan, Chung moved to Missouri in 2008 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in biology and international relations at Washington University. After receiving her degree, she began her Ph.D. at Rice University. But when her adviser got a job at UNM last year, she decided to move to New Mexico to work with her.

Chung, a teaching assistant for the biology department, said she tries her best to communicate science efficiently during review sessions. She said she emphasizes the importance of being “clear and organized” and of interactive science classes.

“The course that I was a TA for was a combined lab course with a field lab,” she said. “We were able to develop a project that we all wanted to do with the students. Being able to collaborate and give and take is really fun.”

In addition, Chung works for TED.com, a company that releases educational talks online, to help non-English speakers in Asia to learn about science.

“All TED talks are in English. I’m not from the United States … and I know that I get a lot more information because of the fact that I speak English. Subtitling these talks means that all these really cool educational things would be available for people who don’t speak English,” she said.

Chung said scientific communication will play a major role in scientific research and education in the country’s future.

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“With the latest sequester, people start arguing about the budget for science,” she said. “That doesn’t happen out of nowhere, and that requires support. And the people who decide whether science gets support or not are generally people who don’t do science. If you want to keep science going and funded, you need to convince people who don’t do science.”

Although she said current programs at UNM fail to emphasize the field enough, she urges students and faculty in scientific fields to consider scientific communication.

“It’s something that’s not too emphasized in the curriculum,” she said. “But it’s something that’s never too early to be working on.”

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