Recording intelligenceAI-generated brief · check the source for context

Immune Booster: Amy Bernard on Science Communication

33:02 recording · AUTO · 2 speakers

Listen to the original

Listen to the episode

Brief overview

Immunologist Amy Bernard argues a non-traditional career and public science communication are now essential, not optional.

  1. A non-traditional career path is a legitimate oneTwo postdocs, a teaching-only instructor role and a year at Children's Hospital each added skills that led to her current job.
  2. Jargon is the barrier we can actually removeEven if every paywall opened tomorrow, most paper titles would still leave a non-scientist behind.
  3. Scientists should talk about small wins publiclyThe public cannot wait five, ten or fifteen years for a JCI paper to hear what a lab is doing.
Executive Summary AI
  • Cindy Leifer interviews Amy Bernard, associate professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who describes a deliberately non-traditional path: a biology undergraduate degree, a four-and-a-half-year PhD in immunology at the University of Rochester on VH434 B cells and human tolerance in lupus patients, then two postdocs, one in developmental biology prompted by her mother's adul1:39
  • An instructor job at CU Denver had her teaching four undergraduate classes every semester, four and four, including immunology and genetics to hundreds of students, which burned her out and pushed her to a year at Children's Hospital writing clinical pathway guidelines.5:27
  • Her old postdoc boss John Cambier then hired her back onto a roughly $20 million campus grant for a human immunology and immunotherapy initiative, which built a human immune monitoring shared resource lab, recruited CAR T specialist Terry Fry, and included the education piece she cared most about.7:38
  • She built free three-day, eight-hour-a-day courses she called fun-sized human immunology, expecting a handful of postdocs and instead filling them mostly with faculty such as pulmonologists who study the immune system without formal immunology training; demand was so high she has handed the series to a colleague.9:09
  • Six basic science departments at CU Anschutz now pool money to have her rewrite their research in plain language, since grateful-patient funding goes to the physicians rather than the foundational scientists; she runs a questionnaire-and-draft process with each scientist, publishes summaries under a tab she calls exciting discoveries rather than publications, and volunteers for Unbiased Science, r18:59
Key Quote
“but if some open doors, if doors open for you, I would suggest you at least look at what's inside.”
— Amy Bernard12:46
Key Quote
“I will say please don't forget what it was like before you started grad school because that's the person you want to explain your science to.”
— Amy Bernard16:31
Key Quote
“You know, like, don't wait for five years to publish it in, you know, JCI. Like, you know, talk about the cool things that you're doing every day.”
— Amy Bernard17:29