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LIFTing Scicomm Trainers

Academic culture includes pervasive resistance to and devaluation of scicomm efforts, often treating science communication as a lower-worth service activity. This punishes higher education faculty, staff, and students who teach, study, and do scicomm. Paradoxically, universities depend on visibility and impact for their operations, and encourage their employees to engage in science communication as long as it’s perceived to benefit the university.

LIFTing Scicomm Trainers participants will identify potential barriers to their career associated with their interest in science communication, identify overlap between their goals and those of their institution, and map out a personalized action plan to get more credit and support for their scicomm.

Facilitators Bethann Garramon Merkle (an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Wyoming) and Virginia Schutte (an independent science communicator) will ask each participant to bring a document to work on during the program, such as a job or award application, teaching philosophy, review/retention/promotion narrative, or a course or program pitch.

Our Program

Scicomm LIFT is a multi-phase research study investigating institutional barriers and solutions to scicomm training access for ecology, evolution, biology, and conservation (EEBC) graduate students nationwide.
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The LIFTing Scicomm Trainers program will test interventions at three intensities and assess longitudinal impacts of such training at a large scale across many institutions of learning.
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The three levels of intervention will be: 

  • In-person workshops (to be offered at EEBC society meetings 2026-2028)

  • Online workshops (offered Nov 17, 2026 and Feb 10, May 4, Jun 23, 2027)

  • Cohort-based coaching programs (offered weekly Oct 20 - Nov 10, 2026; and Jan 13 - Feb 3, Apr 6 - 27, and May 26 - Jun 16, 2027)

 

Eligible participants are:

  • Life sciences/EEBC-associated faculty and staff who want science communication to be more valued within academia.

  • Scicomm trainers employed within higher education who are (or would like to start) including scicomm in their job applications, promotion materials, awards applications, etc.

 

Benefits of participation:

  • Joining a community of practice dedicated to overcoming institutional barriers and fostering support for scicomm training in academia.

  • Shifting academic culture toward more respect, credit, and pay for scicomm-related work.

  • Helping graduate students in the U.S. take advantage of an increased number of high-quality scicomm trainings in graduate education.

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Are you a science or scicomm instructor and interested in getting involved?

First cohort starts October 20!

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