In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd goes behind the scenes of the White House Fellowship program with Lav Varshney, associate professor of engineering, computer science, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Varshney served as a White House Fellow from 2022 to 2023, where he worked at the National Security Council with Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology. In this episode, Varshney describes the day-to-day experience of working at the White House, gaps in the innovation system that science policy can help fill, and how making artificial intelligence systems more transparent could define the future of AI applications. Resources:  Want to become a White House Fellow? Applications open November 1, 2024.  As a White House Fellow, Lav Varshney contributed to the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. Read Varshney’s contributions to Issues: a review of a biography of the information technology pioneer Claude Shannon and an assessment of how intellectual property rights can keep up with advances in artificial intelligence with coauthor Deepak Somaya.  Visit Kocree to try out AI music generation and Ensaras to learn more about using AI to monitor wastewater.  Visit the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research to learn more about Varshney’s work on making AI systems more transparent through information lattice learning.  

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The miniseries has explored how economics can be used to advance environmental justice, how solar-powered canoes can protect the Amazon from deforestation, and how refugees create communication networks to respond to climate change. On the final episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU professor Melissa K. Nelson. Nelson shares her thoughts about the impacts of climate change on Native American communities, agriculture, and what can be learned from Indigenous sustainability practices.  Resources:  See more of Melissa K. Nelson’s work on her website.  Listen to the Cultural Conservancy’s Native Seed Pod, a podcast hosted by Nelson about Native foodways, ancestral seeds, and traditional ecological knowledge, and visit their Native Foodways page.  Visit the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Traditional Native American Farmers Association websites to learn more about Indigenous farming techniques. Learn more about indigenous practices and environmental sustainability by reading Traditional Ecological Knowledge Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Daniel Shilling. Check out the other episodes in our Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer mini-series!

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Faheem Hussain to learn about how Rohingya refugees are using social technologies and what they can teach the rest of the world about communicating in disasters. Hussain is a researcher whose trajectory was changed when he visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. There, he learned how the community uses an innovative combination of online and offline technologies to create networks to share information.  Resources: Infrastructuring Hope: Solidarity, Leadership, Negotiation, and ICT among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh Gendered effects of climate change and health inequities among forcibly displaced populations: Displaced Rohingya women foster resilience through technology

In our new miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we're working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU associate professor David Manuel-Navarrete to talk about his Solar Canoes Against Deforestation project. Working closely with Ecuadoran engineers and the Kichwa and Waorani people, Manuel-Navarrette’s team has been helping to develop a solar-powered canoe that can bring renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure to the Amazon. The story of the canoe offers lessons about how to meaningfully work with communities to understand their needs and co-produce solutions.  Resources:  Learn more about Solar Canoes Against Deforestation and watch this video to see the canoe in action.  Want to learn more about co-producing sustainable climate solutions? Check out some of Manuel-Navarrete’s recent publications. Embodying relationality through immersive sustainability solutions with Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  Fostering horizontal knowledge co-production with Indigenous people by leveraging researchers' transdisciplinary intentions. Leveraging inner sustainability through cross-cultural learning: Evidence from a Quichua field school in Ecuador. Co-producing sustainable solutions in indigenous communities through scientific tourism.

This has been a record-breaking summer all over the world. Many cities have recorded their hottest days ever, and June 2024 was the hottest month on record worldwide. Mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change, including extreme heat and long summers, will require a lot of bold new ideas.  This summer, we’re highlighting some of those ideas in a mini podcast series, Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer. Over four mini-episodes, we’ll explore how faculty members at ASU’s Global Futures Lab are working with communities to develop cool techniques and technologies for dealing with climate change.  In the first mini-episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Danae Hernandez-Cortes. Danae shares how economics can be used to advance environmental justice and how policies can affect communities who are most harmed by climate change.  Resources:  Visit Danae Hernandez-Cortes’s website to learn more about environmental economics and environmental justice. 

Since 1973, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (STPF) has brought thousands of scientists and engineers into the policy world. The fellowship is a very popular pathway into science policy, and AAAS fellows have featured in several episodes of our Science Policy IRL series.  In this episode, we talk with the STPF fellowship director, Rashada Alexander. After completing a chemistry PhD and postdoc, she applied for an STPF fellowship that placed her inside the National Institutes of Health, where she worked for 10 years.  Alexander talks to us about how her fellowship experience helped her look up from the lab bench and find meaning in her life. In particular, she found ways to build relationships, learn how to read a room, and navigate organizational structures—skills that are not always valued in scientific labs. She explains why scientists and engineers should apply for this transformational experience.  Resources:  Learn more about the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship.  Applications are now open for the 2025–2026 STPF cohort. Apply by November 1.  Want to hear more about how fellowships can help launch scientists into a career in policy? Listen to our episodes with Quinn Spadola (another AAAS fellow) and Zach Pirtle (a Presidential Management Fellow).  Are you doing science policy? Take our survey!

Most people are familiar with DNA, but its cousin, RNA, has become widely known only recently. In 2020, of course, RNA was in the news all the time: the COVID-19 virus is made of RNA, as are the vaccines to combat it. Technologies based on RNA could lead to innovations in biology, medicine, agriculture, and beyond, but researchers have only scratched the surface of understanding what RNA is capable of.  A new report from the National Academies, Charting a Future for Sequencing RNA and Its Modifications: A New Era for Biology and Medicine, proposes an ambitious road map for coordinated projects to understand RNA. This large-scale effort is inspired by what was achieved for DNA two decades ago by the Human Genome Project.  On this episode, host Monya Baker is joined by Lydia Contreras, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the authors of the report. Contreras talks about what RNA is, the challenges and potential of this effort, and what lessons could be learned from previous efforts with the Human Genome Project.  Resources:  Read the full National Academies report: Charting a Future for Sequencing RNA and Its Modifications: A New Era for Biology and Medicine. Visit the Contreras Research Lab website to learn more about Lydia Contreras’s work.  Retrospectives on the Human Genome Project.

In this podcast, experts discuss transitioning to cleaner energy technologies, including the challenges and potential of the green transition. They explore the role of government support, advancements in green tech, and the balance between pragmatism and idealism in decarbonization efforts.

On this installment of Science Policy IRL, Lisa Margonelli goes behind the scenes of Congressional policymaking with Brent Blevins. Blevins is a senior congressional staffer and staff director of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, which is part of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Space, Science, and Technology.  Blevins talks about his unusual path into science policy (he didn’t study science, and he wasn’t a AAAS fellow!) and what staffers in the House and Senate do in the science policy world. He also talks about the incredible experience of getting to set policy for things like sending humans to Mars while also having a staff job that can end with any two-year election cycle. Resources: Want to learn more about what it’s like to work as a congressional staffer? Check out our Science Policy IRL episode with Amanda Arnold.  Learn more about the House Science Committee by visiting the House Republicans Science Committee website and the House Democrats Science Committee website. The Senate version of this committee is called the Senate Committee on Science, Commerce and Transportation.  Have thoughts you want to share with Blevins? He tells us his email in the episode, and he really wants to hear from you! Listen to the end of the episode to get his email.

Caregiving is a nearly universal human experience, but it’s not often thought of as an issue with implications for our nation’s science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) enterprise. A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action, seeks to change that. In some academic STEMM environments, devoting time to care for family members is still seen as a taboo subject because it clashes with the idealized notion of scientists who focus exclusively on their work. The lack of legal and institutional support for caregivers drives many people to leave STEMM fields altogether. What can be done to change this inequity? On this episode, Issues editor Sara Frueh talks to Elena Fuentes-Afflick, chair of the report committee and a professor of pediatrics and vice dean for the School of Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital at the University of California San Francisco. Fuentes-Afflick talks about the pressures of balancing caregiving with a STEMM career; how complex and poorly implemented policies are hurting workers and the economy; and steps that the government, universities, and others could take to make a difference. Resources: Read the Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action report and find more resources.  Learn more about federal policies and practices to support STEMM caregivers by reading the National Science and Technology Council’s report.  Find more of Elena Fuentes-Afflick’s work on her website.