How to Woo Capitol Hill? Johns Hopkins Is Putting On a Research Extravaganza

Marcy Davis had her elevator pitch down.

Huge deficits in reading ability had made it harder for Baltimore’s high-school students to succeed, she said, practicing into a computer screen on Monday morning. But a semester-long reading lab for ninth graders had helped them build vocabulary and read more fluently. That work, funded by the Department of Education, was making a difference.

Getting to a cohesive pitch took practice. Davis, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education, isn’t used to short and snappy spiels explaining her work. Instead, she’s used to the language of academe, dotting posters and PowerPoint presentations.

But in two days, she and a group of other Hopkins professors expected to be pitching their work to a far different audience: A Capitol Hill bonanza packed with hundreds of lawmakers, congressional and funding-agency staff members, business leaders, alumni, and top university brass. She was nervous. It wasn’t her audience’s job to care. And some of them control the federal pursestrings that Hopkins’s research depends on.

At the other end of the videoconference was someone charged by the university with taking Davis’s presentation across the finish line: Keri N. Althoff, an associate professor of epidemiology with a communications background.

Skip the lengthy introduction with your full name and academic title, Althoff told Davis. Stick to “Marcy from the School of Education.” Explain the stakes of the problem: There are serious repercussions when many kids entering high school are reading at a fourth- to sixth-grade level. Then, jump right into the solution — the reading lab.

Althoff’s work is part of a larger strategy at Hopkins to encourage the university’s star researchers to step up their communications skills with policy makers, advocacy groups, funding agencies, and community members. A big part of her job is to train professors for Wednesday’s event, for which the university will bring several vans packed with cutting-edge hardware and newly developed materials. Two years ago, the inaugural program brought more than 200 people to a high-ceilinged room on Capitol Hill, with music and speeches. This year Hopkins is going bigger — bringing in more scholars, attracting more guests, and spending more money.

The event, dubbed Hopkins on the Hill, holds significance at a place that depends deeply on federal dollars. From the 2008 to the 2017 fiscal years, the most recent data available, Hopkins spent the most federal money of any university on research and development, according to the National Science Foundation.

“We live and die by our grants literally more than anyone else,” said Denis Wirtz, the university’s vice provost for research. “More than Princeton and Harvard,” he said, if “we stop getting our grants within a few weeks, we have to lay off people. It wouldn’t take much time. We don’t have much of a buffer.”

After hearing Althoff’s feedback on Monday, Davis gave her presentation another go.

“I’m Marcy,” Davis said, “from the School of Education. And my concern is that our high-school students are not coming into high school with the reading skills they need to pass their courses — and to graduate.”

She finished her pitch. “Marcy,” Althoff said excitedly, “it’s all there.”

Introducing Creativity

Blowout events like Hopkins on the Hill are rare for universities, but campuses nationwide are feeling similar pressures to communicate the value of their work. In some cases, professors and graduate students are learning how to be the messengers.

It can be an unnatural transition.

Scholars can have an “unventilated quality” when they explain their work, said Stephen S. Hall, who developed the curriculum for New York University’s science-communication workshops.

Deep knowledge can inherently sound official and formal, a far cry from the “human enterprise” that scientific research really is, he said. NYU’s intensive workshops were opened a few years ago to professors after years of serving only graduate students and postdocs.

They try to introduce narrative and creativity — including through poetry writing — into how researchers communicate their work. Without the ability to express the importance of one’s research, Hall said, it’s hard to get attention in a fiercely competitive funding environment. “I can’t stress enough how hungry scientists are for this kind of thing,” he said. “That’s really impressed us. They really are interested in and enthusiastic about and really want this training.”

Rice University in 2014 moved its STEM-engagement office under the wing of the research division, centralizing the enterprise, said Carolyn Nichol, the office’s director. Last week, over Chinese food, graduate students at the private university in Houston practiced explaining their research in a way that is accessible to high-school students.

Rice is now trying to embed oral and written presentation skills into every core engineering course, Nichol said. The skills could quite literally pay off: One of the National Science Foundation’s grant criteria is to illustrate the proposed grant’s broader benefit to society.

Part of the effort at Hopkins, said Julie Messersmith, its executive director for research, is overcoming a reputation that if you’re a professor there, “you put your head down, and you do good work.”

Earlier this year, Althoff began a yearlong fellowship in research communication, taking on the Hopkins on the Hill event and other initiatives for a wider group of faculty members. Messersmith envisions the fellowship as a pilot for a possibly permanent role down the line, particularly for someone, like Althoff, who has a research background.

It’s easy for a professor to discount the advice of a communications specialist who doesn’t understand academe, Messersmith said. They could say, “you don’t know my struggles, you don’t understand that I don’t have an extra hour a week to spend on Twitter,” Messersmith said.

Still, there are barriers. Though more universities say they value this work, scientists say they do not do it because they are not rewarded for it in promotion or tenure decisions in a way that justifies the time required, said Elizabeth Suhay, an associate professor of government at American University who has surveyed scientists on the issue, in an email to The Chronicle.

Suhay, along with staff members at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, compiled a report listing recommended practices for scientists talking to policy makers.

It’s about “thinking concretely about what those goals are for you,” said Emily T. Cloyd, director of the association’s Center for Public Engagement With Science and Technology and one of the report’s co-authors. “And how you can help that person achieve their goals.”

‘Let’s Jump on It’

Six weeks ago, Althoff kicked off training for the scholars conducting the presentations at Hopkins on the Hill.

Exercises like pairing off professors to practice the spiels and filming presentations to a larger group emphasized the importance of clarity and initial conversations. Jemima A. Frimpong, an associate professor in the Carey Business School, noticed she was talking with her hands too much and tried to make better eye contact. Victor M. Nakano, executive program director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, felt embarrassed after he reviewed his recording and heard himself stumble over his words. “I was a little taken aback,” he said.

An Iraq veteran, he also learned to weave in his personal story. Now, he plans to say, “We’re going to save soldiers’ lives by building better, and hopefully lighter, armor materials.”

Nakano presented at the 2017 Hopkins on the Hill event, and he said the difference between the events is striking. Two years ago, faculty members weren’t as prepared. “Some of the assistant professors, brand new faculty, they were caught off-guard a little bit [and] got more scientific,” he recalled.

Now, he said, they had a different outlook toward preparation: “This is an opportunity. Let’s jump on it.”

Messersmith said the university is spending roughly $30,000 on this year’s event, about twice as much as two years ago. Organizers will need 24 televisions instead of 12. Before the event, they personally invited as many people as they could around Capitol Hill. About 250 people attended in 2017, and more than 600 people registered before Wednesday’s event.

Among them, Messersmith said, are federal-affairs staff members at other research universities, who may be considering similar events in the future.

Althoff’s advice at the session covered everything from how to pull in someone passing by a booth to projecting the appropriate amount of confidence in one’s results.

“We are trained as researchers and scientists to always know the limitation of our work — sometimes even more than we know the strength of it,” she said. “We are a very conservative group. We know how much evidence should be behind something that we call a fact. Sometimes it’s an unrealistic amount … we’re kind of our worst critics in that way.”

After a workshop, she has followed up with faculty members via email, in person, over the phone, and via video chats — like the one on Monday with Davis. In their call, Althoff told Davis to tie in her personal experience: She’d grown up in Baltimore and now visits schools in its poorest neighborhoods regularly through the lab.

Davis nodded: “Baltimore’s really my soft spot.”

“That piece is essential,” Althoff replied, “when you think of the structure of your pitch.”

Davis had a few last things to do. Figure out what to wear. Refamiliarize herself with a PDF of names and faces of possible attendees — so she knows whom she may meet. Decide whether to bring her published academic articles (no). Pack up the fun, space-themed worksheets meant for the kids she teaches.

She thinks her program officer will be happy about the exposure. “She doesn’t want the research to die with the research article,” Davis said.

But participating will provide another benefit, too. “It makes you feel good,” she said, “that people seem interested.”

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.