For the fifth year, George Washington University welcomed to campus the D.C. Science Writers Association (DCSWA)—a community of science communicators in the D.C. region including journalists, writers, broadcasters, bloggers, freelancers and public information officers who came to network, sharpen skills, share knowledge and avail themselves of the intellectual resources and expertise of GW researchers and professors.
“It is real people who love their work, love to communicate to the public about how science is important in their lives,” Mike Newman, the outgoing president of the association said. “But we couldn’t do this without George Washington University.”
Ellen Moran, vice president for communication and marketing at GW, which along with the GW Office of the Vice Provost for Research sponsored DCSWA’s Professional Development Day, welcomed the early morning gathering. “We’re in a moment in time right now where clearly conveying the value and the life changing impact of scientific research has never been more important,” she said.
The conference of more than 100 participants heard from Roy Richard Grinker, a Columbian College of Arts and Sciences professor of anthropology and international affairs, whose keynote described his personal journey to studying mental illness. Grinker’s great grandfather and grandfather were both neurologists but differed sharply over psychiatry, which he said his grandfather pursued “to figure out what to do about mental illness other than just put people away in institutions and warehouse them.”
Grinker has studied ideas of mental illness in various periods of history including the progression of the psychological profession. Three main topics served as frameworks for his keynote: capitalism, war and epidemiology.
In capitalism, he said, the stigma of mental illness is associated with the inability to work. “The conception of mental illness as the sign of the idle, a personality incapable of achieving the ideal, producing for oneself and the economy,” Grinker said.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, in England and in France, families brought people to asylums who were “incapable of working” because of mental illness, alcoholism or even a physical disability. At one point, nearly 1% of the population of Paris was confined, following the transition from feudalism to capitalism. People fled to cities where many of them ended up in institutions and asylums, which is where categories of mental illnesses were invented as a way of trying to understand why people did not fit in.
During World War II, his grandfather’s work on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) revealed the problems brought on by stress, showing a need for more psychiatrists, and most importantly, he said, that mental illnesses could be treated outside of institutions.
Epidemiology emerged in the 1960s as an attempt to medicalize and lessen the stigma of mental illness by treating it like other illnesses. But, he said “the more psychiatric conditions are seen biologically, the more people are stigmatized.”
It was difficult to get a fix on some disabilities, such as autism, he said, because the construct constantly changed, from an adjective for introversion in the 1800s to one of the four main features of schizophrenia in the 1900s to by the late 20th century when Asperger's was included on a huge spectrum of autism traits.
Grinker explained how, today, social conditions play a role in the increase in the number of people with an autism diagnosis, as better services become available and as the stigma of autism decreases.
Grinker said that is “a victory of many years of brave health care workers, psychiatrists, psychologists and speech therapists, trying to destigmatize human difference that caused too much suffering.”
Making the most of AI
In a presentation by award-winning science communicator Ellen Kuwana, the conference heard about the value of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly for science writers dealing with highly complex material.
“Understanding which tool is good for which purpose, and that you can’t pull out a jackhammer every time you need a little screwdriver or small hammer is what I want you to take away,” Kuwana said.
Acknowledging that many in the audience were likely already using GenAI tools, she cautioned them about copyright issues, image generators and other tools that hallucinate and make things up whole cloth. And Kuwana encouraged them to dig deeper in the GenAI toolkit than spell check, grammar check and experiment with more advanced tools.
Her toolbox includes editGPT, not to be confused with ChatGPT, and PerfectIt, proofreading software for professionals, which can be customized for language styles, make text more formal or less formal, do literature searches, change zombie nouns to verbs, and make text more concise.
A favorite she said is SciteAI, built with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. With more than 200 million papers and proceedings from conferences uploaded, it quickly responds to queries and provides contrasting takes on a subject as well.
The list went on, but she urged the audience to take the time to investigate every tool they use, find out who created it and funded it, which will tell them about its reliability.
Lunch with a GW researcher
During lunch, the science communicators met in small groups with a number of GW researchers, including:
- Vikram Bhargava, a GW Business assistant professor of strategic management and public policy and philosophy who discussed his investigation of technology addiction.
- Sherry Davis Molock, a Columbian College of Arts and Sciences (CCAS) professor of clinical psychology whose work examines risk factors in suicide among African American adolescents and young adults.
- Sarah Shomstein, a CCAS professor of cognitive neuroscience, who surprised a number of the science communicators with a declaration that the right brain-left brain formulation regarding creativity was largely a legend, as well as other intriguing facets about the mind and memory.
- Emily Smith, a Milken Institute School of Public Health associate professor of global health who described her experiences working on maternal and newborn health in Africa, India and Afghanistan.
- Ryan Watkins, a Graduate School of Education and Human Development professor of educational technology leadership who has developed interdisciplinary research that explores how we create, train and interact with technology in the classroom and the workplace.
Grinker also stayed to speak with science communicators during the lunch.
In the afternoon, sessions resumed with a meet-and-greet for writers to talk and pitch story ideas to editors at The Washington Post, Politico, Science News, Smithsonian and other outlets. During a panel called “Notes from the Field: Writing in Far Off Places,” writers from The Washington Post, American University and NASA shared their experiences finding, writing and reporting stories from Alaska to Antarctica to Death Valley.
