Telling the story of science
How students learn to explain complex research beyond the lab
A student presents a research concept during BIOL 3950 – Topics: Science Communication, practicing how to explain complex scientific ideas clearly to a non-specialist audience.
"Science communication is more of a form of storytelling than a kind of data transmission," John Brubacher, Adjunct Professor of Biology, says.
The CMU science programming and facilities provide students with exceptional opportunities to formulate and investigate scientific questions, but the scientific process does not end when an investigator satisfies their own curiosity.
Useful science involves dissemination of insights to scientific colleagues, and beyond, to the general public.
BIOL 3950 – Topics: Science Communication is a senior-level course designed to address that complexity by focusing on how scientific research is communicated.
"We need to view communication as part of science itself," Brubacher says.
"This is not like some separate thing that we tap onto the end of a research project. It's an integral part."
Rather than focusing on lab work or experimentation, students spend the term reading real research papers, talking through them together, and figuring out how to explain what's going on in a way that makes sense to a non-scientific audience.
"For science to be useful, you have to be able to communicate to non-scientists working in other disciplines as well," Brubacher says.
Brubacher says the ability to explain findings clearly—whether to peers, collaborators, or the public–is just as important as collecting the data in the first place.
That emphasis feels especially relevant in a world where scientific information is constantly circulating, but not always clearly understood.
Brubacher points to public health conversations around COVID-19 as an example of how easily research can be misunderstood when it is poorly communicated.
For about half the semester, students focus on just one published research paper to study, giving them time to learn the background science and understand how the research unfolds.
The papers students work with are drawn from recent scientific literature, meaning they are engaging with research that is still actively relevant.
By returning to the same paper week after week, students move beyond surface-level understanding and begin to see how scientific arguments are built.
"The students had to be able to identify the thesis and sort of tease out the really important parts of the paper," a task Brubacher says isn't as easy as it might initially sound for some of the published papers.
"They needed to sift out what's really essential... parse out what is the important stuff to communicate your story."
Students practice this skill through presentations and class discussions. Instead of relying only on the visuals included in the original research, students create their own diagrams to help make complicated ideas easier to follow.
Brubacher says the process helps students view the research in a whole new light. "Sometimes I don't really understand something until I've tried to write it out for other people," he says.
Explaining the research out loud forces students to slow down and work through their preconceived assumptions of the paper. As the common adage says, 'teaching is the best way to learn.'
The course counts as an interdisciplinary biology requirement for biology students and also fulfills an area course requirement for students in Communications and Media or English.
For Brubacher, that mix matters. Science rarely happens in isolation, and neither does explaining it. At CMU, learning to communicate science becomes part of how students learn to engage the world thoughtfully, responsibly, and with clarity.