Tell the Story They Want to Hear: Science Communication with Alexa Lamm
Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture Guest: Dr. Alexa Lamm, Professor of Science Communication, University of Georgia Producer: Rich Braman Episode: S02E12, Blooms and Beyond, Season 2 Duration: 55:46 Air Date: October 11, 2026
Welcome
Ping Yu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Blooms and Beyond podcast, a podcast that uncovers plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. I’m your host, Ping. How’s everyone doing today? I am doing great, great because here I have my dear colleague and friend Dr. Alexa Lamm from University of Georgia here with me today on this show to talk about the very interesting and exciting topic on scientific communication, which I am a big fan of that. She is definitely one of the rock stars in this field, and you’re gonna have a glimpse of that too. And I know she has tons of interesting story and knowledge and experience to share, so I don’t want to steal any more thunder from our speaker today.
Let’s just jump right into it. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Alexa Lamm. I hope you enjoy.
Meet Alexa Lamm
Ping Yu: So hi, Alexa, welcome to the podcast. But first, let’s start off with the introduction. Can you tell our audience a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Alexa Lamm: Thank you so much for having me here today. I really appreciate being invited and getting to be a part of this awesome podcast that you’ve started. I love listening to it myself. And a little about myself. I am a professor of science communication at the University of Georgia. I get to study how people communicate about critical issues facing the agricultural industry. And so a lot of that is in partnership with scientists like yourself. And so it’s wonderful to get to come here and talk about that ’cause there are many ways in which we can effectively and not so effectively communicate about scientific advancements and some of the things that might hinder our ability to use science out in the field.
From Animal Science Kid to Extension Agent
Ping Yu: Yeah, ‘cause I still remember the first time I met Alexa during a meeting with the multi-state group. We’re all kind of working in irrigation. But I was like, when you started to introduce of what you do, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s very fascinating.” Because a lot of times, especially me with- as a extension specialist, I always try to find a way to, you know, help, well, improve the communication efficiency. And I was like, “That would be great.” And I know you had a workshop with the growers and it just like, I want to be part of that.
Anyhow, but did you grow up with the exposure to agriculture? Did you see yourself as a nature kid growing up? And how did you become interested in science communication? Did you know that’s a thing when you grew up? Can you share just a little bit about your career journey?
Alexa Lamm: Yeah, of course. No, I was your typical animal science kid. I did 4-H when I was young, showed livestock and horses and wanted to be a veterinarian. So you know, I went off to college and got an animal science degree with every expectation that I would go to vet school. But I realized that I liked working with healthy animals and kids and producers a lot more than sick ones.
And so I ended up getting a master’s in extension education and was an extension agent for almost ten years working in the agricultural field in Colorado. So I really have Extension at my heart. It’s been a part of my career, ‘cause after that, I went and got my PhD at the University of Florida, and I was actually there. Don’t hold it against me, all you UGA Dawg fans. I was there for about ten years before coming to UGA eight years ago.
And it’s interesting because I always have had Extension at the heart of all of my work. But now I can see that really, truly, Extension and science communication, they’re not distinctly different. I mean, Extension is the original science communication, where we take information from the land grant university out to those who need it the most.
I think it’s just become a little more complex as the public has become more engaged in guiding legislation around scientific advancement, right? The funding of science, whether they want to use it or not. They question it based on pseudoscience and miscommunication and all this kind of crazy stuff that’s out there on the internet they can access all the time. But they can vote for legislation that blocks our ability to, you know, utilize science or to fund science.
And then also we have this whole policy dynamic and regulation around the use of scientific advancement especially in the horticulture industry, right? As we think about some of the practices we try to encourage as extensionists, and it’s like, I don’t know how many producers say, “Yeah, I would love to use that, but there are regulations blocking me.” And so we need effective science communication between scientists and those decision-makers making those choices too, so that all of that’s informed by actual scientific information and not what people think might be the truth.
Why Evaluation Became Her Focus
Ping Yu: Well, yeah, there’s a lot of fake, well, I would say pseudo or fake information out there. Especially I think the scientific communication, the topic that we’re talking about now today is especially important at this AI era, where you basically think that you can get all this information with just a click, but you don’t know, like, how much of that is science-based information and you cannot truly trust what you find with the one click, and you have to fact check with basically everything so that you’re not making mistakes in a lot of things that you do.
So what motivated you to pursue the PhD in agriculture, education and communication and focus on communication evaluation? Because, well, I am a extension specialist, but I know how important communication is in terms of deliver the information to our stakeholders. But one of the trick thing for us sometimes is how do we do the evaluation? How can we know if I’m a effective communicator myself?
Alexa Lamm: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And I mean, I mentioned that I was an extension agent for ten years, right, in Colorado, just south of Denver. And it frustrated me for years that we would always talk about Extension is the best-kept secret, right? We still say that. It’s like we do all these amazing things. We put on all these fabulous programs and webinars, and we’ve expanded in this digital age. We’re even creating AI-based chatbots that we can interface with. I mean, we’re- we do so much as Extension, and yet we find the same people utilizing our services over and over. How do we reach the broader producer base that could utilize what we do? How do we reach the public? How do we get, you know, all this information out there?
And a lot of that is because we were unable to showcase our impact. And like you just mentioned, we still struggle with that. And so I had a real passion for trying to figure out how we most effectively evaluate our programs, but evaluate them in the way that the public cares about and that decision makers care about, so that they will continue to fund and support Extension, which to me is essential in the science communication space.
And so, you know, it keeps coming into question, is Extension really something of public value? Should tax dollars be supporting this, right? State and federal dollars. Well, if we can’t show our impact, it’s really hard to make that argument. And so that’s why I pursued a PhD in that area. And then I did serve as an evaluation specialist in Florida for about eight years in that capacity and then came here to Georgia originally as the evaluation specialist.
Ping Yu: Yeah.
Telling the Stories of Impact People Care About
Ping Yu: And you kind of mentioned about the impact. That’s one of the big questions that every Extension people [laughs] kind of face or have to do. But from your perspective and experience, what are some of those impacts or evaluation critiques that are different from, you know, for instance, to deliver the right message that the politics makers or the general public care more than the educator like us care more about it? Can you kind of tell us a little bit about from that angle?
Alexa Lamm: Yeah. So I think oftentimes when we do extension programming, it’s very producer forward, right? We’re trying to help producers understand the new science and how it can be used in their facilities or their farms or their production units. And a lot of producers, I mean, that’s their livelihood, right? That’s their business. And so we focus on economic profitability. Like, you should adopt this because it will save you money or make you more money, right? Because that’s what incentivizes people. They have kids they want to send to college too, and that is a viable reason for them to want to know if I change everything I’m doing and adopt this new practice, it will result in something positive for me.
I think because of that, then we talk about impact of our programs as, well, these producers are making this much more money or they’re saving this much money. But the general public and the policy makers, they don’t really connect with that, right? It’s like, okay, so what? So all of my tax dollars are going to help a farmer make more money? Like, that doesn’t sit with me.
Where if we can talk about environmental sustainability, how much water is saved that can then be used for other sources or other resources that maybe recreational facilities that they utilize will be viable and open because water use has been reduced because of like the irrigation practices that you develop that help conserve water on farm and then save water for other things. We have to tell stories that the public cares about or the decision-maker cares about, and honestly, the decision-maker typically cares about whatever their constituents care about, right? Because they’re representing them, and they should.
And so we really need to get in the minds of the, like it’s not always the user of science that benefits. We have to talk about what are those benefits beyond that. And so I think it’s important for producers to gain knowledge and to have an intent to engage in a certain behavior. And we can measure those things with evaluation tools at extension programs.
But I also think it’s important for us, collectively us, the scientific community along with the ag community, to really think about, like, well, how is this bettering society? How does this make sure that produce is on the shelves when a mom is going to buy her groceries, right? How is this ensuring that those groceries are not so expensive that she can’t, like, balance that meal for her family? Those are the things that she cares about. And so I think we need to think beyond, like, okay, we do have a target for scientific adoption, but then who benefits from this? And we need to tell those stories of impact. And that is when people will really care.
A Win-Win-Win
Ping Yu: Yeah. ‘Cause I think that’s a great tip for me, for a lot of folks like me. Basically what we need to do is we need to think beyond the stakeholders we are serving now. They are part of our society. What they are doing is a big puzzle piece in this whole society. So what we are doing kind of benefit them, but also benefit the whole society.
Alexa Lamm: We can all win, right? It can be a win-win-win, and I haven’t talked to a single producer that doesn’t care about the environment, that doesn’t care about where their product ends up and that it benefits someone, right? It’s like they go into farming and production agriculture because they care. But I think, like you said, we kind of stop at our first stakeholder, and we don’t necessarily think about that long term. But I promise you, when you sit down and you talk to those producers, they care.
Science Communication as a Two-Way Dialogue
Ping Yu: So let’s circle back a little bit for folks that, whom may not be so familiar with science communication. How do you define that, and especially within the context of agriculture and environmental science that we’re all in right now?
Alexa Lamm: Yeah, no. Science communication seems like pretty easily defined, right? It’s like transferring information from one person to another, right? There’s a, somebody who’s delivering the message, and there’s somebody who’s receiving the message. That’s kind of how communication has originally been defined. However, we’ve kind of moved beyond that to more deeply think about the, a two-way dialogue, right?
It’s like it’s one thing for the scientific community to stand in front of a group of producers and share scientific findings and say, “You need to utilize these and adopt these, and this is how.” It’s a whole ‘nother for them then to listen to producers who say, “Well, that’s great, but I have this system already in place in my greenhouse, and adopting that practice is not gonna work with the drip irrigation that’s already existing for XYZ. Can we make a few tweaks here? And maybe because it’s not, it might not be quite as efficient in saving water, but I’m gonna be able to use it without replacing everything in my irrigation system.“ Then the scientist can say, “Yeah, we can make a few tweaks. Let’s try ABC instead of XYZ.” And then it, so it becomes a two-way dialogue, right, between the end user and the scientist and the s- or the scientific team.
And so then science communication is really evolving more collectively than in that one way traditional sense of we are the deliverers of science to the end user. You should love it because of here’s all the reasons why. And so it becomes more of this kind of interface, right?
It’s the same thing with regulation. We can come up with science all day long, but if the producer says, “Well, I think that’s great. I would love to grow in this container. However, Walmart will not accept that,” right? “My wholesaler won’t take it because Walmart won’t accept that pot because it deteriorates too quickly on their shelves, and so I can’t grow in that, even though you tell me it’s the most efficient, effective growing mechanism.” Or maybe their machinery doesn’t handle that pot well, and it deteriorates, right? So they can kind of tell us back and forth that like, yeah, like pie in the sky idea’s great. Here’s reality, right? Let’s ground it somewhere in between and find a scientific advancement that helps us all.
And so we really need to take the time to share our science but also listen to the end user and take that in and adapt our science effectively to help them the most, and that should be a continuous reciprocal relationship. That’s true science communication.
Knowledge Passed Down on the Farm
Alexa Lamm: And the other thing we have found when you really open yourself as the scientist, opens yourself, is that indigenous knowledge that the farmer has that’s been passed down from generation to generation, there is usually a scientific explanation for why it works. They can’t tell you that, but they know it works, right? And so we can also learn a lot as a scientific community by listening to what that knowledge, that passed down knowledge is from the community that we’re serving, and kind of adapt and utilize it in our science to make everything better. So yeah, like, that’s a really neat way of thinking about science communication too. It’s not always, right, like the ivory tower, we know best, here do good things. Like it’s, it is about that kind of like continual conversation about what works, and maybe they don’t know why, but it does.
Ping Yu: Yeah, and also that’s just give you- you just listed a perfect example for us to kick in and that will benefit the, what involved science itself, because while the growers might have all those generations of wisdom of how this works for them, they may not know the science behind it, and that’s a opportunity for you to, you know, to dive into it and say, “Oh, why, this is why it works.” And you may develop a strategy that will, more people can adapt it with your, with the science that you have, well, with the science solution that you have developed from whatever they are working.
Alexa Lamm: Exactly, ‘cause maybe it’s been working on this one farm because they’ve had this knowledge over time, but you can then help a whole bunch of other farmers based on that, you know, transferring that information. So yes, there’s a lot of opportunities when we engage in more effective, like two-way dialogue.
Ping Yu: Yeah. I always find myself learning a lot from the growers that I serve, and I was like, oh my gosh, they are, they are just so knowledgeable on certain things that I was like, “What?”
Alexa Lamm: Yeah, absolutely.
Four Pieces of Effective Science Communication
Ping Yu: So we talk about some of the effective science communication. What are some core principles of effective science communication, particularly if we’re talking about topics or complex topics to, let’s say, lay audience?
Alexa Lamm: Yeah, that’s a great question. There are really four foundational pieces to effective sci- in my mind and from my research.
One, first you have to know who your audience is. Like, is it the producer? Is it a certain segment? We talk about the public all the time, right? But the public is made up of so many different people, and what they care about is, you know, the 20-something-year-old that just graduated from college and is just trying to make it in their first job and save up to buy their first home cares about a lot different things than I do as a middle-aged woman with a family, right? Versus someone who is nearing, you know, retiring and… So different people are looking for different things, and that is even within our farming communities, right? Like the young producer is looking for different things than somebody who’s been doing it for 60 years, right? And they need different resources and different things.
So the very first thing in effective science communication is getting, like identifying who your audience is and then getting to know them. Listening to them, getting to know what they care about, finding out where they go for information, who they rely on, right, and who they trust. Because next is you gotta know what they care about so that the message you’re sharing resonates with them, right? Is it, are they driven by economics? Are they driven by environmental sustainability? Like, what is it? Are they looking to decrease water use or enhance their recycling efforts on farm? Like, what is it that’s driving them, and how can I then create a message or a webinar or whatever that’s gonna resonate with that, right?
A Source They Trust, on a Channel They Use
Alexa Lamm: And how do I bring the right people to the table? Because the source is also really important, okay? ‘Cause we think as scientists that we’re the best deliverers of scientific information, especially if it’s coming out of our labs. But honestly, we trust, different audiences trust different sources of information, and they rely on them differently. So I talk to producers all over the US, and a lot of the time they will tell me that they trust their local extension specialist. So like here in Georgia, I am sure you are their go-to person, right? But not necessarily in Florida, right? They’re not gonna call you, especially if you’re wearing red and black, right? They’re going for orange and blue. [Ping laughs] They’re calling the University of Florida, IFAS, their local extension agent, right?
And so you might wanna partner with someone, maybe your stuff applies to both Georgia growers and Florida growers. Partner with somebody at Florida that can then deliver the message there to those producers because they trust them and they think that they know more about their farm, and they probably do, right? It’s valid in who we trust.
The final piece to that puzzle, so I said audience, know your audience, what they care about, so create a message they care about, deliver it by a source that they trust, and then the final piece is it needs to be on the channel that they use. So for instance, this podcast is awesome, and there are a lot of producers that have told me they love podcasts because when they’re driving in the truck or they’re out on the tractor or they’re in the farm, they just plug in their headphones, and they can just listen, right? They don’t want a huge long email newsletter anymore. They want the podcast ‘cause they can just listen to it and hear all the great stuff that you’re sharing. It’s awesome.
But there are some that just want the email newsletter that they can read when they have a moment or every morning over their coffee or once a week or whatever. They know they’re gonna get this newsletter, and they’re gonna look at it. And there are others that want social media pushed to them. There are others that want webinars. A lot of producers want face-to-face contact. They love that traditional face-to-face extension field days and getting together. So you also have to know what their method of receiving information is.
So those are kind of the four pieces. Know your audience. That’s the foundation of it all because that’s gonna drive the other three, right? What they care about, the message, tell the story they wanna hear, not the one you wanna tell, from the source that they trust on the channel where they’re already present. Don’t ask them to go somewhere new.
Ping Yu: Yeah. It’s funny that you said all those principles. It just basically similar to the message that I got from the, a general communication. There was one kind of course from Harvard that I tuned into maybe two years ago about communication, and then the first principle from that is know your audience every time.
Digital Media and the Rise of YouTube
Ping Yu: I’m glad you mentioned some of the digital media that people are using, including podcasts, webinars, and there’s, like, Facebook and other media platform that people are getting information out. But from your experience, how has the explosion of digital media changed the way that we communicate science, and what changes, what challenges does it create for us as communicator?
Alexa Lamm: Gosh, that’s a great question, and it has changed the landscape. I would say even more than just the explosion of digital media, COVID changed the landscape. When we were kind of forced into utilizing it, pre-COVID, we were kind of dabbling, and Extension was exploring its use as an option to kind of reduce costs and try and alleviate the pressure to travel a lot. But then COVID kind of thrust us into, like, this is how we communicate because it’s the only way to communicate, and now because people adopted it more readily during that time, like, we can continue to use it. I mean, the farmers I work with, it’s just as easy to get them on a Zoom screen to have a conversation as it is to get them face-to-face anymore because it’s less time, right?
So I do think it has changed the way that we communicate science in that it has opened the doorway for a lot more. And it also means that less people are gonna show up at the face-to-face stuff because we’re all really busy, and we see other ways of obtaining information. So one of the things I’ve noticed, especially in, like, the nursery greenhouse industry, this space is the use of YouTube. So a lot of producers, they want videos from folks like you on YouTube explaining, like, how a scientific advancement or something they can do. They even want you in a greenhouse with a GoPro, like, so they can just watch the video and listen to you talk rather than necessarily being there. And even if you are there doing, like, a field day, also projecting it that way through Facebook Live and then posting it on YouTube later, you will have a bigger reach than ever before. And so I think that is how digital media has really helped us do a better job of communicating science, in that we can have a bigger reach, we can get to more people, but we really have to think strategically about it and do some things ahead of time to set ourselves up for success.
I think the biggest thing is when we choose not to do the traditional things because the digital media is easier, right? So if a scientist decides, like, “Well, field days are a lot of work. I have to set it up. I have to find a facility. I gotta do lunch. I gotta get people here. I have to think about reimbursing for mileage, if that’s even a possibility. Like, how am I…” You know, when the option is that they could do a webinar for an hour. Like, you know, it’s hard. It’s hard to make those choices, but you can do, you can do kind of a combination thing where you’re doing it live face-to-face, but you also have a digital strategy. Or maybe you can’t get everybody there together, but you can go into your research greenhouse or whatever and video and do that and talk to people, even on Facebook Live and have them interface with you, but then take that recording and put it on YouTube so that somebody can watch it when they have the time available to do it.
Pork Production, Misinformation, and Filling the Space
Ping Yu: I’m glad that you mentioned the YouTube, and I came across one of your studies on the pork production on YouTube.
Alexa Lamm: Mm-hmm.
Ping Yu: Can you tell us a little bit more on that, and how do you think the medium shapes the producer’s knowledge gain? And are there any way that you can trace back and evaluate their knowledge gain or even behavior change? That’s just a term that every Extension people would say.
Alexa Lamm: Yeah. That’s a great question. The article you’re referring to was one we did as part of a project funded by the National Pork Board. They were really interested in communicating more effectively about pork production methods and trying to get the public to understand some of the sustainability efforts and the animal welfare efforts that the industry undertakes ‘cause there’s a lot of misconception out there. And I do think that’s something that the digital age, Ping, has, like, really brought in, right, is this whole idea of pseudoscience, misconception, false information that is presented very similarly to scientific information. You talked about AI and, like, typing in and getting your answer, but you can’t really always trust that answer full stop, right? We need to do some source checking and identifying source credibility.
Now, that being said, though, so we are in competition, right? But that being said, we can look at, more than ever before, what those that may not agree with us think and believe because they are readily out there, right? If the scientific community, if the agricultural community chooses not to be present, there will be others that fill the space, right? Like- And then that’s what when you search, you find. And so when the public, when the decision-maker goes to search, they have a question about, like, water use on farm, if we don’t have good stuff, the other stuff will show up, and it looks very real and very reliable.
And so, one, we’ve got to teach people critical thinking skills, [laughs] like the ones you talked about earlier, right? That it- we do need to look into credibility and find out who the source was, and is this a reliable source of information, and kind of track back to where it came from. Because sometimes the misinformation out there, they track back to a journal article, but they just completely misinterpreted the data, right? And it- and I don’t think that it’s always intentional. I think that sometimes there’s disinformation and misinformation. And disinformation and misinformation means one’s intentional and one’s not. Either way, it can cause harm, and so we need to be, like, teaching people how to think critically about what they find online. But we also have to be present with the good stuff or, like, there’s only the bad stuff available. So it’s kind of filling that space too.
Why Trust in Science Is at an All-Time Low
Ping Yu: You have worked with studies examining public decision-making about science topics. And I know there’s a lot of folks out there, like you said, they are sourcing information online on YouTube, but what kind of insights that you can share with us of how people make decisions when they receive scientific information, and how we as scientists can build trust with those diverse audience who might be skeptical of scientific message?
Alexa Lamm: Yeah. So it’s really an interesting time. I just was giving a presentation last week at K-State on science communication and shared with them that, you know, we’re at a time where trust in science is at an all-time low. It’s about forty-three percent of the general public will report that they trust science, and that’s scary, right? That’s like, wow, what do they not trust about us? But honestly, when you dig deeper into the literature, you find that they believe that scientists have their own agenda, right? That we only ask the questions that we’re curious about, and then we build our experiments based on what we want to find, not leaving ourselves open to the possibility of new information emerging or things that contradict what we say.
And I’ll be honest with you, a lot of that is our fault, the scientific community’s fault. One, we like to think we’re pretty darn smart and that we’re right all the time, and how dare you question science, right? We get defensive about our results.
But we also, sometime, somewhere along the way decided to stop publishing like null results, right? We test a hypothesis, and only if we find something where the hypothesis is proved to be true do we publish it, right? It’s like, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard faculty say to a graduate student, “Well, it’s unfortunate that this didn’t result in any significant findings because now you can’t publish it.” And it’s like, well, isn’t the fact that we tested a hypothesis and it didn’t prove to be true a finding? Like, and I think that’s how the public thinks about science. It’s like, well, why are we only hearing about the significant results? Why are we not hearing about all the other science that goes on that proves that what the scientists thought was true isn’t true, right?
It’s like, so we’ve kind of created this space where it’s like, all right, we’re perceived as only asking questions we’re interested in, not the ones that they care about. And then when it doesn’t work out the way that we think that it should, we don’t publish it. We don’t talk about it. And so it’s kind of like, well, would I trust that too?
And then when you look at funding mechanisms and who’s funding different things, it comes into question too. Like, well, if the Agricultural Commodity Board that you’re studying is funding this, then are they informing your research findings or the way that you’re interpreting your results? Right? So we kind of hear sometimes like, “Oh, we believe they’re in the pocket of Big Ag,” right? Like, and we hear those kinds of things, and scientists are brought into question online, and social media influencers are trying to entice followers, and they do that by asking provocative questions that will get people emotionally connected to their pursuit or their agenda. And then the scientific community doesn’t do that, right? Because we try to remove emotion from everything. We try to say, “Well, no, it’s scientific fact, it’s scientific truth, it’s grounded in research.” But then the needle moves, and the science changes and shifts, and it’s like, well, you said that was fact ten years ago, and now we have new technology that’s proven that’s not the case anymore. And so like, is it really fact or is science like a movable thing? So we’ve given the public and decision-makers as a part of that group a lot of reasons not to trust science.
How Scientists Can Rebuild Trust
Alexa Lamm: So your second part of your question was, how do we build that back? One, I think we need to be more transparent about what we do, how we do it, why we ask the questions we do, and what the results are. I think our journals need to publish non-findings just as much as publishing significant findings, like non-significant and significant findings. We shouldn’t be removing the non-significant stuff from the conversation because that is the proof of like over time, right? Things haven’t changed versus have.
I think we need to stop talking about scientific fact and truth. We- You know, you go to the doctor, and they talk about practicing medicine. “We figured out this is what we think is wrong with you, so we’re gonna try this solution, see what happens, and then we’ll come back together and see if we need to adjust or adapt that, right?” They never talk in like medical certainty. But yet for some reason in the scientific community, we do that.
And I think we need to talk more about like the advancements of science and how it shifts and changes, and what we learn leads to better learning, and as we create more machines and even AI, right, we can do things with an efficiency that we couldn’t even just five years ago, let alone twenty years ago. And so I think we need to stop talking in like scientific certainty, fact, truth, because truth is really kind of one of those like kind of gray areas, right? What’s true for me may not be true for you, and we need to be more okay with that. And that we can shout science all day long, and somebody can know it and be informed, and yet still choose to do what they see as right for them. Because humans are emotional, they’re not logical, and science talks to logic, numbers, facts, figures.
And so we need to bring, finally my last point here, we need to bring more emotion, more storytelling to science. And I think people like you doing this podcast, bringing different groups on to tell their stories. I love when we talk about scientific adoption and impact to not always talk about like generalizable large numbers, but rather, here is a producer that adopted this practice. This is the challenges they faced, these are how they overcame them, and this was the end result of their product and their success long term. That resonates more with other producers as well as the public and decision-makers than any like generalizable fact figure ever will. And so we need to bring that human emotional component back to, like, not only communicating about science, but also its impact, telling those stories.
A Study That Found No Germination
Ping Yu: Yeah, I feel the same because, like you said, the non-significant results are never get published. One of my students, they- he did a study on Osmanthus fragrans, and one of the things that he found is that there’s no germination for whatever he has done. And so we ended up having to, well, the most part, well, we were like, okay, now I don’t think the, any journal article gonna accept the fact that we don’t have any significant results on that, but we can only do, what we could do to still deliver the information to whoever who might be thinking that’s useful is through a proceeding, which kind of discouraged him. But anyhow, that’s the only gateway we can do right now. But I agree with you that there are a lot of study that, well, without the significant results, but they are still very valuable information that needs to be getting out there.
And also, I think one of the misconception from us as scientists and also the general public is that science is science. It’s 100% right. It’s not changeable. It’s just there. But I see science as a moving piece. I think science advance will evolve over time.
Alexa Lamm: Yes, I agree. And you know, we do talk about confidence intervals and all of that, and we acknowledge there’s limitations, but then when we go and share it, it’s like, well, this is our finding, so this is what it implies and this is our recommendation and… Right? So it is a tricky one. It is tricky.
Emotion, Storytelling, and Starting with Your Why
Ping Yu: I love the way that you mentioned that we need to bring the human part more to the science or scientific communication and add more emotion in there instead of just logic alone. Can you tell us a little bit more about what, why the… Well, can you talk about the role of emotion in science community? And give us an example, if you have one, of how that can shape the reception from the audience we’re talking to of better receiving the communication from science instead of just using the logic alone.
Alexa Lamm: Sure. I’d be happy to. One of my biggest suggestions when you’re walking into a room or providing a program for a group that you’re, you maybe don’t have trust with already, right, is starting your, like, not just jumping right into the content, but starting with your own why. Like, why are you standing in front of them that day? Why do you care about this? Why are you studying this? Because people resonate with emotional connection, right?
So I have a lot of reasons why I do what I do, but most deeply in me is I believe strongly in science and scientific advancement and the funding of science because my daughter was born with a heart condition, and she went, underwent open heart surgery when she was just two months old. And I found out as a scientist digging deeply into the literature, that if she had been born just fifteen, eighteen years prior, she never would’ve survived because the scientific advancement to save her life was not available. And it’s because there are faculty at the University of Florida and around the world studying pediatric cardiology that there is the science available to literally save my daughter’s life, and it did. She had a second open heart surgery right after her second birthday for another reason that was also successful.
So when I think about my superhero, the person I look up to the most, his name is Dr. Mark Bleiweis, and he is a professor at the University of Florida, and he has saved my little girl. And that’s enough, right? That’s enough for me to get up every morning and fight for science. And it’s not just medical science, right? For me, it’s agricultural science because I’ve also seen misinformed regulation take down farmers’ right to farm. And it comes from decision-makers that are informed by a public that are completely misinformed about the scientific backing of agricultural production techniques. And so I have a passion for that, right?
But I will start a conversation or a presentation to hundreds of people with my own why. And it’s making yourself vulnerable and emotional and sharing personal things like I just did with you, that then builds immediate trust with people because it’s like, “Okay, I get why she’s here, I get why she cares, and it’s worth listening to.” We- if we expect other people to feel emotionally connected to the information that we are providing them, because that’s what actually changes decision-making, is emotion, not logic, right? They go hand-in-hand. Then we have to be willing to be open and honest about our own emotional connection to the information.
Like I can tell even you telling this story about your grad student, Ping, that it’s painful for you that he went through all of this and then struggled because he deserves to be published because he did all this work. Besides the fact that you don’t want somebody else now to go and waste all this time and money conducting this same experiment, knowing full well from your own lab that that is not gonna germinate, right? So that knowledge needs to get out there. So, I think when we start sharing like why we do what we do, and resonating with people and connecting emotionally, but then talking about scientific findings and how they can help society, and telling not only stories about the people we work with, but stories about ourselves, that can help build trust.
The Connection a Machine Cannot Replace
Ping Yu: Yeah. I really appreciate that you shared that, and I have come across some other guest speakers in, on the podcast sharing their personal stories like this, and I just find fascinating. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m doing this podcast, and I know it’s a lot of work, but I really enjoy it because as a scientific community, as us, especially agriculture, we have tons of those intriguing stories from a lot of different people, but our story was definitely not being told enough to the general public, and our impact to the whole society was underestimated for a lot of reasons.
And you know, at the end of the day, everybody has their own family, and they have the reason to do certain things with their own logic behind it, but we’re human. It’s emotion. It’s those stories that connect us as a human, as a species on this planet that other planet doesn’t have. So I think no matter how AI advanced down the road, the core thing that distinguish us with other is the connection, is the emotion that we have. So thank you for sharing that. I think that’s just one of the fascinating thing about us as a human, as a society, that we share and that make us unique.
Alexa Lamm: Yeah. Absolutely. And you can’t replace that, right, with a machine. You can’t replace that connection, and we need to use it to our advantage because I will tell you that advocates that are anti-production agriculture or really anti-whatever they choose, they use emotion, right? [chuckles] They use stories. They elicit anger and fear. And I’m not saying the scientific community should do that, but there’s no reason why we should always be separating ourselves from the emotional connection that we have to the work we do and to each other, just like you said. But it means making ourselves vulnerable, and that is not what we are taught to do in grad school, right? But it is important.
Measuring the Impact of Science Communication
Ping Yu: So in terms of the science communication effort, how do you assess that, and what kind of metrics or indicators do you use?
Alexa Lamm: That’s a great question. We do have tools. We have quantitative tools like common measures type of tool that can assess public value of a program, of an extension program. So how much knowledge was gained by the receiver of the information, what is their intent to use that, and then even following up metrics, observational metrics over time to see if that behavior was altered, right? And that takes a lot of tracking at the six-month, twelve-month, twenty-four-month mark. A lot of people will commit to doing something, but we know about 80% of intention doesn’t follow through in full behavior change.
But we can also assign economic values to information. We can ask people to do that. Most people know if some information will lead to an economic loss or gain for them, if they are gonna save money or have more resources. But we can also measure levels of emotional well-being, so how much something will help them feel more secure, more safe. So we have some of those measures available that are being used more and more by Extension. And I worked very closely with some ag economists to create that tool, oh, about eight or nine years ago, and we have about half of the United States that uses it pretty consistently within their extension systems. So there are those ways.
But truly, honestly, I think when I look back at all the work that I’ve done with extension specialists like yourselves, it’s really going back to the producers that are like the opinion leaders within the system. ‘Cause there’s always the producer that everybody else looks up to, right? And it’s like, if they’re gonna do it, then others will adopt it. If they decide not to do it, you’re done, right? But going back and working closely with them and seeing what they’ve implemented and then asking them to tell stories or even connect you with others on what they’ve done, that’s truly the better measure of impact. It’s just not as quantifiable, right? It’s the story of impact. But I think those are just as if not more powerful. It’s when we can partner the two together that they’re the most effective when talking with decision-makers because they want the numbers, ’cause they have to have the numbers, but then the face, the story, the picture, the video behind it really helps that information resonate, like what does it actually mean?
Ping Yu: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I now realize it, it’s kind of a quick shift from the, [chuckles] from being vulnerable to the metrics and then the logic. That’s just one side effect for a lot of scientists like me ‘cause when we talk about something we’re like, “Okay, how can we quantify that?” [chuckles] It’s just- you know, it’s just the nature of us.
Controversial Topics and Online Critics
Ping Yu: Well, ’cause now we talk about a lot of controversial topics like GMOs, climate change, food safety. How do you approach those emotional topics or controversial topics in the communication work?
Alexa Lamm: Oh, there are definitely some sticky spaces out there, right, within the ag area, and you named several of them. I would definitely say genetic modification of crops and now as we are adopting CRISPR and moving into genetically engineered crops, and the two words sound similar but are different and explaining the difference between the two and what is CRISPR and all this stuff, right? We can learn a lot from our previous mistakes. I think transparency, open transparency is important for consumers as they think about where they’re going to for information, do they trust that source, right? Anytime something feels hidden, we need to be more open about it.
But I think we also need to recognize that there will be people that will argue for the sake of argument. Like I mentioned earlier, the influencers that are really just trying to elicit reaction because that’s what gets them followers. And it’s not even that they necessarily are that passionate or believe in their own response, but they’re doing it to elicit engagement because that’s what gets their posts and the algorithm to pick them up and so they have a different incentive than we do. And so oftentimes when a scientist tells me like, “Man, I would love to post about my science online, but I just, I can’t handle the heat. I don’t… like I don’t know what to do when somebody reacts, and then I don’t wanna engage ‘cause I’ve heard of, I’ve heard these horror stories of scientists that engage with social media influencers and lose their jobs and…” I mean, we’ve all heard those stories, right?
And the truth is like I tell them, “Don’t engage.” Like you don’t have to answer back. Just because somebody’s coming at you, you do not have to respond. Delete, delete, delete. Like, and soon they will get tired and they’ll find another target. And you just have to recognize that like if you don’t engage, it’s a better long-term strategy. And relying on your communication folks at your university to help you with that and to guide you, because maybe sometimes there is a reason to engage or to have a reaction, but it’s probably best coming from your university rather than you. And so I would- I argue that like we have to be out there, we have to fill the space because if we don’t, it will get filled by other stuff. We talked about that earlier. But when things come and get tense, it’s like just stop reacting.
“I Just Delete the Line”
Alexa Lamm: I have a good friend, he’s a celebrity chef. His name’s Lazarus Lynch. He was a World Food Prize fellow. He won Chopped twice. So he has a huge social media following. He’s big into the mental health space. And but when he’s cooking, he’s talking about the science behind production agriculture and like why he believes in certain products and locally sourced products in these spaces, and how that, it goes into his cooking and his meals and nutrition and stuff. So he reaches people with agricultural information like I mean, probably more people in like a minute than I do in ten years, right? I mean, he’s that kind of guy.
And I, my- I had him guest lecture one of my classes once. He Zoomed into one of my classes, and one of my students asked him this exact question, like, “What do you do when things get hot?” And he said like, “I just delete the line. Like, I just, I go in and it’s like I do not have to let that sit on my social media feed. I just take it out. Haters gonna hate, I accept it, and I move on. And that is okay. And it’s like we all just need to get comfortable with the fact that people are gonna disagree with us, and it’s okay. Let them go. Just-
Ping Yu: Yeah, I guess it’s just shake it off.
Alexa Lamm: Yeah. Right? But- it’s when you react, that elicits more and more and more, and can get you into some serious trouble. So I will admit, like, I have had, especially working with the National Pork Board, which you mentioned earlier, and being funded by them, I’ve had some groups publish some not-so-nice stuff about my team and we just let it go.
Ping Yu: Mm-hmm.
Alexa Lamm: And you know what? It never picked up steam. It never did. And you just gotta like, in the moment though, ooh, it doesn’t feel good.
Advice for Early Career Scientists
Ping Yu: So with your intense involvement and experiencing science communication, how can early career researchers and communicators prepare themself for better future public engagement and better effective communicator?
Alexa Lamm: I think early scientists have a unique opportunity to engage with folks like me or take a course or a workshop. We have more agricultural communication faculty in the United States than ever before. It’s a burgeoning, like, I mean, it’s an emerging field. And so most of the land grant universities have someone like me that’s offering programs, support, workshops in effective science communication. So don’t be afraid to engage in that and learn. Keep your mind open and learn as much as you can. Attend workshops, engage with the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, CAST. They do an excellent job of communicating science. And so if you wanna learn about what effective ways, they have webinars and programs. They’re a great resource.
But all the early career scientists out there, a little different from me, are digital natives, and so you all know more about communicating online than I ever will. And even though I study it and I teach about it, use what you know. Like, use what you know in terms of your personal life and connecting with people on social media or through podcasts or through YouTube or whatever, because I think sometimes we don’t really recognize that we have a lot of our own implicit knowledge in this space. And so be open to embracing that as part of your job. Um-
Ping Yu: Yeah. And one of the comment that I wanna make is just, you know, be modest enough, so acknowledge that you don’t know everything.
Alexa Lamm: [laughs] That’s true.
Ping Yu: There’s always people that can teach you something, and that might change your whole life.
Alexa Lamm: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And be willing to engage in the conversation.
Where to Find Alexa’s Work
Ping Yu: If people wants to, you know, find more information, your work or some of the workshops that you do, and basically just to follow along with your work and hopefully become a better communicator like you, where do you recommend them find those information?
Alexa Lamm: Like I mentioned, CAST is a great resource. If you’re interested in learning more about me and my lab and what we’re up to, please check out our website. If you just Google Lamm Lab, it will show up. I’m at the University of Georgia, so please follow. We have a podcast of our own called AgriCurious. It’s actually designed for early career scientists that are interested in learning about communicating about diverse scientific interdisciplinary teams. So please join us there if you’re ever interested. But also connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m happy, I would love to connect with you. I’m actually @lexlamm, L-E-X-L-A-M-M. But also feel free to email me anytime if you have any questions, and I can even connect you with faculty at your university that can help you too.
Ping Yu: Yeah. I’ll make sure that I put all your, those resources and links on the show notes so people can find them easily. But thank you, Alexa, for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us today. I enjoyed a lot. I just hope that I, we can have this conversation going and going. But thank you so much for the work you do and, you know, reshape the, hopefully we can reshape our community as a whole down the road to make it better for our society. Thank you so much.
Alexa Lamm: Yeah, it was a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Closing
Ping Yu: Conversation like this only happen when you support the show. For more information and find ways to support us, please go to bandbpod.com, bandbpod.com.
If you like what you are hearing, spread the word and share this podcast with the people you love. Make sure you hit that subscription button and give a review for the podcast. And as always, go check out the show notes to learn more about this topic and other topics we featured on the show at bandbpod.com.
Thank you for listening. Till the next time. Stay healthy and go plants.
Transcript produced for Blooms and Beyond / UGA Center for Urban Agriculture