Dr. Laura Lindenfeld, dean of the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University and executive director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, shares the center's philosophy and innovative approach to helping scientists and researchers build skills and develop strategies for reaching audiences in new and engaging ways. Dr. Lindenfeld discusses the Alda Method, a unique type of science communication training that combines improvisational theater-based techniques with message-design strategies, including analogies and narrative.
Dr. Laura Lindenfeld, dean of the School of Communication and Journalism and executive director, Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science
Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University
School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University
The Link -- Connecting Science Communication Research with Practice
The Engagement Ring, Episode 11, Say 'Yes, and...' to the Science
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from Dr. Laura Lindenfeld’s interview.]
MARY HUNT: Welcome to the Engagement Ring, your connection to an ever widening network of higher education professionals, scholars, and community partners, working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast…
LAURA LINDENFELD: You have a lot of people producing science who love the intricacies, the joy of doing the science. When you're trying to communicate as someone who loves that process, and wants to talk about the details of it, with someone who really wants to know what it's going to serve and what the outcome is going to be, you've got a big cultural difference.
MARY HUNT: Dr Laura Lindenfeld, executive director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, shares the center's philosophy and unique approach to helping scientists and researchers build skills and develop strategies for reaching audiences in new and engaging way.
LAURA LINDENFELD: What we try to do at the Alda Center is put you in a position where you can develop empathy and understanding of how someone else might think or feel, so that you can imagine what kind of communication might land well with them.
MARY HUNT: … And now my conversation with Dr. Lindenfeld on building bridges, trust and meaningful connections through effective communication about science.
[Program introduction ends and interview begins]
MARY HUNT: Welcome to the podcast, Laura.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Thank you, Mary. Pleasure to be here.
[Music fades out]
LAURA LINDENFELD: It's so nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
MARY HUNT: I've really been looking forward to our conversation. I've heard a lot about the center and am really interested in hearing more. But first I want to ask you: why is it important for a scientist to be a good communicator? Isn't it enough that he or she is a good subject-matter experts working on solving problems, finding solutions? Can't we leave the communications part up to the experts, the PR people, the media folks, reporters? Why does it have to fall on the scientists shoulders?
LAURA LINDENFELD: That's such a wonderful opening question. To conduct science you have to be a communicator. You have to communicate through your grant proposals, and team members. But really, when I think about the vision of the Alda Center… the world benefits from what we learn in science and technology, engineering and math, and that the information that that people develop and create becomes useful and inspiring. And that has to happen through communication. So to me, I mean a world where people don't hear directly from scientists at some point there's such tremendous loss. It’s one of the greatest assets we as a society produce… is science.
MARY HUNT: I love the name of the center, the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. In one sense it's very captivating, but it's very clear and obvious what you work to accomplish every day at the center. Tell me a little bit about the origins of the center. How did Alan Alda come to be affiliated with Stony Brook and how did you and Alan get together and come up with a plan for working every day.
LAURA LINDENFELD: This is a really fun question. Alan, of course, is a wonderful, famous actor.
MARY HUNT: A treasure. A legend. A treasure.
LAURA LINDENFELD: He's wonderful human being and he's fascinated by science and for 11 years he shot Scientific American Frontiers, fascinated by science. And on the set numerous times he would notice, and there's one in particular I'm going to tell you a story about, he's interviewing this scientist, happened to be a woman, and he's got eye contact with her and he's able to make her relax and be comfortable and she's just describing her work in really engaging ways and then she remembers the camera and she looks at it and it's like the lab coat went on and she froze, and she started talking about her work in a completely different way. And then he describes it... he kind of coaxed her back, made eye contact with her and they were connected, and the language was great. And then she remembered the camera and went back into the lab coat, and he thought "Jeez, I can't just sit here forever and pull great stories out of scientists." What if we use training that I had as an actor and the only training he had was in improv. He never went to conservatory, so he studied improv. That's the basis of his entire training as an actor. What if we were to use improv with scientists? Now that I know Alan better, this is such an Alan Alda way to think about the world. What if we did this? So he went around and he asked a bunch of universities in the greater New York City area and at the time I don't think public engagement and communication were in the foreground of the conversation. Alan really helped to propel that. So a number of universities said, “You know we're fine.” Stony Brook University, where the center is housed, said, “We will give that a try.” So the center was founded, initially the Center for Communicating Science and then Alan's name was added to it in 2009. So that's the origin of the story. How did I meet him? I had been at the University of Maine for 16 years. I ran a public policy research center, was a professor in communication and I had come down to Stony Brook University. I'm from Long Island originally, so it was like coming back home and I went through the training at the Alan Alda Center, and it was the best professional development experience I'd had in my career, and I thought, wow, this is amazing. So I became connected with the center and then in 2016 they were searching for a new director and as much as I was saddened to leave Maine after so many years, there was no way I wasn't throwing my cards in for this position. So I met Alan earlier when I came to train with the center and then, obviously, when I became director worked closely with him since then.
MARY HUNT: And he still works closely with the organization, doesn’t he? Do you guys work together on training programs or ideas or, you know, planning for the future of the center?
LAURA LINDENFELD: Yeah, I touch base with him at least on a monthly basis, and we run exercises by him and troubleshoot things. He used to travel quite a bit for the center. Obviously COVID put a little damper on that, but we have a really robust team here that does the trainings inspired by Alan's work and then refined by the experts here at the center, but always in consultation with him.
MARY HUNT: Let’s talk about the Alda Method. So, you say it's based on improvisation. To begin with, what does improvisation mean? When I think of it, I think of maybe… comedy routines or think of someone pretending to be something he or she isn't. But as I understand it, improvisation, in your view, is very authentic communication. It's not stepping out of yourself to be something else; it's actually being more of who you are.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Oh my gosh, you phrased that so beautifully. I don't know that I have so much to add. I mean improvisation is a form of theatre that helps you connect and relate by being in touch with others and yourself. And there's two core principles that we use in improv. And the first one is that you say “yes, and...” You say yes in the sense of you accept the reality that someone else is bringing to you and you move it forward. It doesn't mean you believe everything someone else says to you, but you accept that's their reality and in the stage of life -- If all the world's a stage, per Shakespeare -- and we're going to make these scenes of life go forward, we have to say “yes, and...” and we have to accept and move forward, so you can use this principle of “yes, and...” even if you disagree with someone. The second principle is to make your partner look good, that it's your role and responsibility in the relationship to show dignity and honor and respect to the other person's humanity. To me improv is really about being genuine. It's not about acting. It's not about taking on a role, although we do sometimes role play, so that scientists who go through our trainings can try out different ways of engaging and see and feel how that lands. But really, this is about helping you find a voice that feels authentic and genuine and clear to you, that aligns with your values, your temperament, and is always accurate and resonant with your work.
MARY HUNT: And again, thinking of improvisation, I think of responding to the idea of listening and reacting. Responding to what is said seems consistent with improvisation and good communication. Do you find that is that true? Is that an important part of this whole idea of trying to stay present and listen to what the other person is saying before you begin to formulate your own response to it?
LAURA LINDENFELD: Yeah, there's this line… Alan has said this. I take this very much to heart. “Communication is the willingness to be changed by the other person.” So if you come in with a set idea about how you're going to talk about something, it's probably going to fall flat if you're not being responsive to that other person's needs. And I think in the context of public engagement, which I know you care very much about, if you're not being responsive toward and responsible to other people, you're communicating to yourself rather than trying to connect with others. I love words, etymology and the root of the word communication. It comes from the word “community,” and I like to think of communication as s a way for us to build bridges toward each other and connect with each other. And I think that embodies what we're after in the Alda Center -- making sure that science… you know it's not like there's science and society. My goodness, you know, I work with a lot of scientists. I'm a social scientist. I'm married to a scientist. He has a bank account, gets on airplanes and needs his car repaired. We are in society. I think it's ensuring that science has a foundational and important role within society and that we've created bridges to ensure better understanding through communication. And to me, if you think about that, building relationships and building community, so that science is part and parcel about what it means to be a citizen, a member of society, I think that's so important.
MARY HUNT: It's interesting because I think of a scientist as being trained to have that set answer or to have all the answers and maybe, you know, set with a formal presentation. So is it hard for scientists, just by their nature, their personality, or how they're designed, to stay flexible and to be able to adapt to a situation where the communication is evolving? Do they have a bigger challenge with communicating than others or do that have the same kinds of communication challenges we have?
LAURA LINDENFELD: I have a couple of responses to that. So, the first one is that you well, when you become a scientist, let's say you get a PhD and then you go on tenure track and you make tenure and you become a full professor. That's a lot of work and that takes years and years and years to hone that expertise. So, if you think about experts communicating rather than scientists, anybody with deep, deep expertise in a field… an economist working for the Fed, this is really complex information and you need to have… first of all, you operate within a culture. If you're working in science, you're working with other scientists who understand you and who learn to communicate with each other in a certain way so that you can get the work done. That needs to get done. Part of that is you learn jargon, and it really bothers me when I hear jargon as used in a pejorative sense. I think jargon is incredibly important and we spend years honing it within our respective fields. I have it in my field, others have it in theirs. The problem arises when someone's not part of that culture and they don't understand that language or that style or that tone. And in a sense you've got to be able to create… you've got to become a polyglot so that you can speak and communicate and write in contexts outside of the one in which you work with people who understand you. Alan loves to use the term “the curse of knowledge.” Sounds dah, dah, dah! You’re cursed by knowledge. I love knowledge. Universities are knowledge production factories. That's what we signed up to do, at least in part. Bridging that to broader public audiences is a whole separate challenge. But what does it mean to be cursed by knowledge? It means that you've learned something so well that you forget what it feels like not to know it. You're cursed by it. You can't see what it's like when you don't know that, and what we try to do at the Alda Center is put you in a position where you can develop empathy and understanding of how someone else might think or feel, so that you can imagine what kind of communication might land well with them based on goals that you have. You asked me, “What is the Alda Method”? Improv is one part of this. We also do a lot of work on strategy.
MARY HUNT: In what way?
LAURA LINDENFELD: It's not enough to just go in a room and be spontaneous. You know, if you're pitching to a venture capitalist or teaching a class, you've got goals in mind. There are things that are going to be more effective for you to say and do than other things, and you should do your homework in advance. We give scientists tools to map out the context so they understand what they're likely walking into and how they want to make sure that they come across and what they want to make sure that they say… what they may not want to say so as not to alienate someone. And then the improv is the moment where you bring that to life. You try and test it out with a partner. We do a lot of partner work in our workshops so that when you actually enter into a real world situation, whether you're speaking or writing, you've imagined that audience, practiced, tried it before you actually do it, so that you've got some comfort zone with how you want to communicate.
MARY HUNT: The knowledge itself is of little value until its shared and really communicated, and really understood by the other side. I think of a doctor's office, for example. How many of us go to a doctor's office and say “I have to bring somebody with me because I don't understand what the he’s saying”? I mean the knowledge just has no value until there is that connection between the two people.
LAURA LINDENFELD: That’s right. I also want to share something with you. We've done some research on how scientists perceive their role as people who engage, and we had this really there’s not one public. There’s no general public; there’s many different segments of the public. There's many different segments of the public. But if you look more broadly at public audiences, when we say science, what people think about a brand, as it were, and my colleague Chris Volpe, he runs an organization called ScienceCounts, it's one word. He's done a lot of work on what, what is the brand of science that people perceive? So we say science, the vast majority of the public hears hope, hope. Science leads to outcome. When you say science to a scientist, and this is not, I'm not suggesting everybody, but people tend to experience joy. They love the process. So you have a lot of people producing science who love the intricacies, the joy of doing the science. When you're trying to communicate as someone who loves that process and wants to talk about the details of it, with someone who really wants to know what it's going to serve and what the outcome’s going to be, you've got a big cultural difference. That's not to suggest scientists should give up joy, because I think that's part of what brings people who love doing science to do science for living, is you love that process. But it is rather to say, if you want to be genuinely empathic, which is at the root of saying “yes, and...” and making your partner look good, you've got to understand most people are coming at this from a different perspective.
MARY HUNT: Tell me a little bit about some of the exercises that you use in the training with scientists. What’s the curriculum like for a training session. Is it one-on-one interaction? Is it group setting?
LAURA LINDENFELD: Maybe I'll describe a typical workshop setting. Let's talk about an in-person, because like everybody else in the world we moved things, except healthcare professionals, although some of them did that too… we moved things online during COVID and now we do both. And I'll also say we, we have coursework and degree programs at Stony Brook University at the undergrad and grad level. We also train around the world. We do hundreds of workshops. We've trained over 20,000 scientists at different institutions, higher education, nonprofits, for profits, national labs, federal agencies -- all over the place. So let me give an example of an in person workshop. Typically what would happen is you'd have a room with about 16 STEM professionals, and that number is specific because we break you up into groups at some point during the day, and two instructors, one who has deep expertise in improv and one who is more on the message design strategy part. So someone like myself with a PhD who specializes in communication. We come into the room and we start off rather easy. We talk a little bit about what is improv, what does it mean. And then we get you on your feet and you do a lot of exercises in pairs. We're helping you build muscle. You know what does it mean to really genuinely listen to someone else? What are you hearing? How do you communicate that back? Are you able to make sure that someone who's following you, that you're pacing yourself and communicating in such a way that they're able to stay with you, or are they lost and overwhelmed? So you do these exercises where you kind of isolate a muscle like at the gym, like I'm going to work on my biceps right now and we tell you we're going to work on this muscle right now and then we're going to add more depth and other muscles to this as we go through the day. So people practice various scenarios, through exercises. They’re fun. I find it's not intimidating. You know, you say “improv” to group of scientists and there's always one who is like, yes, are we going to do scenes and then others are like, oh lord, please don't make me do this. And what we find is people feel really invigorated… tired because it's a lot of work… really invigorated through the experience.
MARY HUNT: What do they tell you? What are the biggest obstacles for them to overcome. It is shyness? Is it, as you say, being intimidated, is itthe jargon of their own profession? What kind of things do they report either they weren’t aware of before they came to training, and they realized in the training or they just know this is why I’m just not really as effective a communicator as I should be?
LAURA LINDENFELD: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. There's some good research on this as well, about barriers that scientists themselves perceive. I would say, a lot of people become aware of how hard it is to access how much jargon you actually use as a scientist without even being aware of it any longer, because it's become so normal to you. It's that curse of knowledge. I think some people come in thinking, oh, they're going to make an actor out of me, and I need to become an extrovert, and I'm not. And I think they're very almost soothed by the experience that we're not suggesting that. We’re suggesting you find ways to be the most effective communicator you can be given who you are and what you care about. So we let you pick, you know what's your goal, what's your goal that you want to achieve with this audience? We also give people tools to map out what they're trying to achieve and with whom, so they can think strategically through that and then try it out. And I think what people discover is this is actually a lot more fun and a lot less difficult than they might think. At the same time, they understand that it requires work and time. One of the benefits that I think we've discovered overtime is having people work in these pairs throughout the course of a day. They realize, oh my gosh, if I have a media interview or I'm going to go talk to a donor, I can phone a friend and practice before I go live.
MARY HUNT: Interesting.
LAURA LINDEFELD: So they learn. It brings the intimidation factor down and it makes them feel more competent and perform better.
MARY HUNT: How do you know if you're succeeding at good communication? What are they noticing about themselves or about their communication interactions? How do they know if it’s working? What should you be looking for in the training situation, or just in any situation when you're communicating with somebody? What are the signs that, yeah, we’re connecting.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Some of it is really teaching about following and paying attention to body language, watching how the other person responds, asking questions. We have some exercises. I don't want to give away too much because some of this has a surprise effect in the room, but you know how much that person remembered from what you just said, and then there is a moment of shock and awe, like, oh, I need to make this simpler. What I thought was absolutely evident and clear just went right past this person. And then you learn that responsibility is mine. If I have the goal and I want to get the message across and it's not succeeding, it's not their fault; they don't have a deficit. I need to take responsibility for doing it differently. So a number of the other exercises we do focus on how do you use language more effectively. How do you use body language? How do you use visuals? What kind of metaphors and analogies land that are accurate and compelling? I do think it's surprising to scientists how much detail they have in their head that other people don't just pick up and remember. So, in some ways it's training people to communicate, so the other person remembers, as opposed to what you want to say.
MARY HUNT: Oh, that's interesting. And how you communicate with Person A might be completely different I would imagine than with Person B. These are individual interactions where you know you have to sort of assess each situation?
LAURA LINDENFELD: That's right, which is where the strategy has to change, you know, if you're talking to…I worked with the university president a number of years ago who had done a bunch of work down in Louisiana cancer alley, and he was going to give a talk and he thought it was to a bunch of adult stakeholders. And he walks in the room and it's like a bunch of middle schoolers. And he was like, wow, have to pivot. I mean that's a completely different presentation. So you know the ability... and we have some exercises that have you do that, like now, take this audience. How does it need to change? And you really understand, boy, the strategy has to be about who's the audience and what's your goal, meaning what is it that you want to change for them, in them, as a result of the interaction with you, so that you make that crystal clear to yourself.
MARY HUNT: When I think of the value of good communication in public engagement, I think of well, faculty members who are working with the community, different members of the community, diverse parts of the community or government or business or other community partners. They have to find a way not just to communicate their knowledge, but their communication has to build a trust and build a relationship, because this is not a one shot deal. Successful communication is long term and sustainable. So I would imagine this is an important strategy, or this is an important part of the training too. You're not just trying to convey your knowledge; you're trying to make a connection, build a relationship.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Trust is absolutely essential and when you walk in the door, people have associations with you, of what you believe in, what you value. You know, are you a member of the same tribe that I am, or are you on the opposite side of whatever political or ideological spectrum? People bring those expectations to the table. So, depending on who you're interacting with, if trust is not there to begin with, the first goal, I think, should always be build trust. That's one of the things that comes out in the workshop. Nobody is going to listen to you and hear you and remember what you said in a useful way, like they could remember it in a bad way if they don't trust you.
MARY HUNT: Or let you into their world or their community.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Yeah. And your work’s not going to have the impact that it could if the trust isn't there. I think that we are led to believe that communication is transactional. Like, I'm going to say something to you, I’m going to give you an example. I have a 19 year-old son. “Mika, take out the garbage.” And what happens? The garbage doesn't go out. This is a relational problem. Mika understands. He's in college, he knows what take out the garbage means. It's not in a language he doesn't understand. This has nothing to do with his ability to comprehend those few words. It has to do with the relationship of maybe I've hit him at a wrong time of the day and he's still tired or he just doesn't want to take out the garbage. Or this is an ongoing battle between us. He's actually pretty darn good at taking out the garbage. What I want to say is that we have to think of communication as relational. You said this before in your question. If we can approach our community partners as people with whom we want to build trusting relationships, we're going to get so much further. You don't just go in and tell someone here use this data, or here support this idea, or climb on board with this policy that I recommend. This is so much more complex and if we're not attending to that relational aspect, we're losing the ability to deploy communication as community building.
MARY HUNT: Stony Brook and the center have been obviously pioneers in doing this. I'm just curious, are other institutions, other universities, colleges, picking up on this? Are they starting to realize the importance of training their scientists as communicators? What’s the nature of the field, or the status of the field these days? Are people seeing the value in it?
LAURA LINDENFELD: I think there's been a groundswell of enthusiasm. It's not where it should be, but my goodness we've made so much, so much progress. When I came in in 2016, Alan got this award from the National Academies for really spearheading efforts around science communication and I think the world has changed since. There are multiple universities that have embedded science communication training programs within their campuses. There are people studying this, some really outstanding work being done. There are a couple of journals that have been around for quite a while, science communication or public understanding of science organizations that specialize in this or that have divisions within their organizations that focus on science communication, environmental communication. So you're seeing a growth of expertise both in research and practice. There are some organizations like COMPASS which specializes… they've done traditionally done a lot of work around environmental communication and policy, but they also work more broadly in science communication. So I think the field is growing constantly and I think that's really exciting. There's a lot of interesting work been done on perceptions of scientists and their role, and I think when you look at this newer generation of faculty who are who are in STEM fields, more and more you're seeing people understand that this engagement work, which requires communication, is something that's part and parcel of what it means to be a scientist. It's not something you hand off transactionally to someone else. It's something you must develop and integrate into the work you're doing.
MARY HUNT: I think that's so true. We see that at the University at Albany. Many of our newer faculty are very interested in public engagement, are coming to our office for support and help. They want to do it and they understand that it's, as you say, it’s about building long term relationships. They don't go into it lightly. They go into it knowing this is something that I have to have the tools to do. I have to have the support, I have to have the partnerships to be successful in it. So they understand.
LAURA LINDENFELD: I think in some ways it’s just a purpose-driven life. You know it's one thing to have joy on the process of doing that work. Wonderful. It's another thing to want to make sure that the fruits of your labor have an impact on society, and I think we're seeing a generation… this is not to say that previous generations of scientists haven't cared about that. That would be totally inaccurate to suggest that. I just think this is more integrated into how people are experiencing work and purpose in younger generations, and I just see this -- the enthusiasm to do this, to learn about it, to be able to integrate it into promotion and tenure criteria so you get credit for it. I think it also makes you more creative and nimble, because there's somebody out there who cares about the work you're doing. There's some, you know, end-user in the university who's going to benefit or draw a purpose out of the work that you've done in a broader way than we might have thought about that as part of the scientific enterprise and how we train people. I think it's really heartening
MARY HUNT: Knowing what we know about the youngest generation -- the college generation, it seems like this is why they want to come to college. So having faculty who are involved in this way is a very important recruitment strategy too. These are the people who students want to learn from, and these are the kind of community engaged courses, internships, and eventually careers, that they're interested in having. So, I think you're modeling something really important for your students.
LAUA LINDENFELD: Oh, thank you! I'm also dean of the School of Communication and Journalism, so I wear both these hats. The Alda Center and the school -- we manage them as one cohesive unit. The Alde Center being quite public, facing the school being, you know, focused on academic affairs and research here at Stony Brook University. A lot of people talk about doing work around diversity, equity and inclusion, and I want us to walk the walk, and that means that we've got to engender a sense of belonging, of community for people who may not have traditionally felt that they could come to the scientific table, so to speak, and be part of that enterprise, and I think, both the act of making sure that we diversify those, the talent pool of those involved in science, that's also going to lead to better science, because if everybody thinks about things in a similar vein, we're not coming up with new ideas. You know communication is critical for us to be able to move that agenda forward as well and for scientists to become involved with public engagement is a way for us to invite new voices and ideas to the table and for those of us already involved in the scientific community to be more thoughtful about who and what we're serving and the work that we do.
MARY HUNT: How did our scientists do during the pandemic in terms of communication?
LAURA LINDENFELD: There were so many interactions and so many contexts. I don't want to overgeneralize. I think there was a lot of… you know we hear a lot about bad communication that took place. I think there was also a lot of great communication. I mean I even think about relatives calling my house. My husband's a biomedical genetic researcher… to talk to him about how these vaccines worked and hearing those interpersonal interactions where people were like oh, that makes sense to me. I was thinking the other day about a book that I just found transformative for my life. It’s called “An Elegant Defense” and it’s about the immune system. And I learned so much from this book. I read it during the COVID pandemic and it really made me hold on to some practices I established about, you know, getting better sleep, exercising, watching what I eat, really attending to those stress levels, and I thought that was a profoundly impactful engagement with science communication. So, sure there was a lot of confusion. There were a lot of problems Things got heavily politicized. Could we have done better on a national level on many things? You bet. There was also a lot of great interactions. And what I would say to any scientist listening to this podcast is I encourage you to reach out and talk to people. It's those interactions, you know, walking down the beach with your dog if you have a dog beach, or at your kids soccer game, or wherever it is… an airport, the person sitting next to you on the plane who asks a question. You know when you approach others with curiosity and care, I think they're more willing to trust you and listen when they feel that you're approaching them with dignity, and that's really where communication starts. One of the other pieces of this, when scientists go through these workshops with us, I think what happens is they're reminded of how creative science is as a process in itself. You know that doesn't mean you do… think that anything goes, but it's generative and the communication about science you know if it's not working this way, let's try it that way, and I think people come out energized and many of them are reminded that they signed up to be scientists because they care about coming up with ideas and new ways to do things. So we've seen people energized out of the workshop, reminding themselves why they signed up to be a scientist in the first place. Then coming up with new ideas. Isn't that neat?
MARY HUNT: Yeah.
LAURA LINDENFELD: So, to your question about why does communication matter for science? Sure, to make sure diverse public audiences really understand the value and importance of science, but also science itself is a creative process that that requires, I think, that level of communication.
MARY HUNT: You often hear it said that by teaching we learn ourselves or we become more knowledgeable and increase our own understanding of something. Have you found through training at the center that your own understanding of communication or your own communication skills have improved? Has it helped you to grow as a communicator as well?
LAURA LINDENFELD: Oh my gosh, yes. I mean every time I'm involved in conducting one of these workshops or observing them, and I make myself do that, you know I'm drowning in administrativa and budgets half the time, but to be able to go back in and remind myself what does it mean to be a leader in today's society, in the organization in which I work and to represent the Alda Center, well which I really hope that I do. I'm constantly relearning principles. It's a little bit like if you've ever meditated. Oh gee, your mind wandered again! Well, that's what minds do, you know. And in some ways it's like meditation that you have to call back to these fundamental principles. It seems like it should be so easy to remember to focus on the other person and their needs, and boom out the window it goes as soon as you get busy or upset or tired.
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LAURA LINDENFELD: So, to me It's like a ritual in practice to remind yourself of what it means to say -- to truly say – “yes, and...” and make your partner look good. Seems so simple. It's a lot of work. and it's joyful.
MARY HUNT: Laura, you representative the center beautifully, so don't worry about that.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Thank you!
[Laughter]
MARY HUNT: Thank you for being my guest today on the podcast. I really, really enjoyed our conversation. Please send our best and thanks to Alan Alda for all he's done to entertain, inform, and inspire us throughout the years, and also for what he's doing now, and what I know he'll continue to do, to help us have more meaningful interactions and understand our world.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Please tune into his podcast. It's great! It's called “Clear and Vivid.” There's a series of people interviewed who are scientists and it's just a joy to listen to him do these interviews. My gosh, he's done hundreds of them at this point so you can download them, I think on Apple… I can’t remember. Sorry about that!
MARY HUNT: We'll find that link and make sure we post it with the resources for this podcast, because that sounds like something to look forward to.
LAURA LINDENFELD: Thanks for having me.
MARY HUNT: Dr. Laura Lindenfeld is the dean of the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University and executive director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. She tweets at Laura Lindenfeld. Listen to “Clear and Vivid” with Alan Alda on Apple podcasts. The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming broadcast, email us at UAlbany O-P-E at Albany dot E-D-U.
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