UC Irvine

Climate change and environmental degradation resulting from anthropogenic activities disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalized populations. Yet, these same populations are often excluded as participants and audiences from science communication and engagement efforts. Thus, we must provide resources and opportunities in science communication spaces that are accessible, inclusive, and co-created in collaboration with vulnerable communities. As a lesson learned from plants and microbes, we must work in partnership with marginalized populations to truly understand and develop effective systems of change to combat the effects of climate change.

Plants do not respond to a change in the environment in isolation—microbiomes that contain mutualists and pathogens are ubiquitous in nature. The influence of such interactions is poorly constrained in our understanding of ecological and evolutionary responses of plants to climate change. To investigate how plant-soil microbiomes and drought interact, I conducted a greenhouse experiment with two California grassland plants, Stipa pulchra and Phacelia parryi, exposed to soil inocula collected from a long-term water manipulation experiment in a natural setting. In a greenhouse, we varied soil moisture and hypothesized that the long-term history of drought provided by soil inocula results in “drought-tuned” soil microbial communities that alter subsequent plant growth under water-limited conditions. For my first chapter, we found watering treatment and soil treatment interacted for S. pulchra, such that plants exhibited greater drought tolerance when grown with drought-tuned microbes than with microbes associated with ambient water availability. No significant interaction was present for P. parryi, but plants exposed to high and low water treatments both yielded reduced total plant biomass when grown with drought-tuned microbes. These results help us better understand how the plant-soil microbe interactions can direct plant growth patterns and highlight the importance of appropriate eco-evolutionary contexts to be considered in understanding species response to climate change.

Similarly, marginalized identities in STEM cannot navigate academic spaces in isolation. To support and empower people from marginalized communities in STEM, it is critical for universities and scientific societies to consider how to make their science communication and policy training spaces accessible and engaging to broad audiences, including to scientists with a wide array of educational backgrounds and social identities (i.e: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, immigration status, disabilities, etc.). To create inclusive training spaces, and truly foster a sense of community within STEM, it is critical to go beyond simply acknowledging or accommodating people of different backgrounds, and instead, intentionally create training spaces that are designed to be accessible and attainable to everyone from the outset. Therefore, I co-founded Reclaiming STEM, a workshop centering science communication and science policy training specifically for marginalized scientists (LGBTQ+, POC, femmes, disabled people, first-generation, etc.).

For my second chapter, I present our workshop model grounded in evidence-based practices, present the main themes and key takeaways from the past five years of the Reclaiming STEM workshops, and share lessons we learned from attendee reflections. For my third chapter, I analyzed over 700 applications for our workshop to understand how marginalized populations use their identities in science communication. I found that based on applicants' experiences in STEM, they wanted to foster a sense of STEM belonging to their own communities through using emotion and identity centered styles of science communication. These findings highlight a critical need to overhaul current science communication training programs to account for marginalized participants' needs and communication goals.