Liz Neeley

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Liz Neeley
Alma mater University of Maryland, BA, 2002
Boston University, MA, 2005
Occupation(s)Founder, Liminal Creations
Lecturer, Yale School of Medicine
Employer(s) SeaWeb, 2005 – 2008
COMPASS, 2008 – 2015
The Story Collider, 2015 – 2020
Known for Science Communication, Marine Conservation
Spouse Ed Yong
Website www.lizneeley.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Liz Neeley is a science communicator, researcher, and founder of Liminal Creations. She was formerly the Executive Director of The Story Collider, a nonprofit organization that focuses on true, personal stories inspired by science. [1] She began her career in marine biology and conservation and has since become an expert in the use of narrative storytelling for effective science communication. [2]

Contents

Education and early career

Neeley received her Bachelor of Arts in Marine Biology in 2002. She then completed her Master's degree at Boston University in Ecology and Evolution in 2005. Her graduate research centered on the evolution of color patterns and visual communication systems in tropical reef fishes—wrasses and parrotfish—in the laboratory of Gil Rosenthal. [3]

Career

Marine conservation

Neeley began her career in marine conservation, applying her general subject matter knowledge to science advocacy. She worked at SeaWeb, a communications-based nonprofit organization promoting understanding around ocean and conservation science to stakeholders including decision makers, community leaders, and the media, to foster the development of measures to protect the ocean.

From 2005 to 2006, Neeley worked with SeaWeb's Asia Pacific Program, partnering with local communities and researchers in Fiji and Papua New Guinea to build communications capacity for them to share their knowledge of local coral reefs ecosystems with the local media. [4] In 2006, she transitioned to the role of Program Manager at SeaWeb, where she helped launch the "Too Precious to Wear" campaign, partnering with the fashion industry to raise awareness around the toll of dredging deep sea coral. The campaign sought to impose limits on coral use in fashion, design, and home decor through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. [5] [6]

Science communication

Following her tenure at SeaWeb, Neeley focused her career more on efforts around science communication, training scientists on how best to share their knowledge of science with a range of stakeholders. She has served as a contributing author on a range of books on science communication. She wrote a section on utilizing social media to promote a scientist's work for Science Blogging: The Essential Guide and contributed a chapter on communicating controversial topics in science on social media in Effective Risk Communication. [7] [8]

Neeley has lent her expertise to a number of groups centered on communicating science to the public, previously serving on the advisory board of the CommLab at MIT from 2015 to 2017 and on the Advisory Council of Ensia magazine. [9] She also holds a Lecturer appointment at Yale School of Medicine in conjunction with the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative. [10]

COMPASS

In 2008, Neeley joined COMPASS, a nonprofit organization co-founded by marine ecologist and former NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco to train scientists to more effectively share their expertise with journalists, decision makers, and the public at large. [11] There, Neeley served as the Assistant Director of Science Outreach, working to develop their training programs in science communication and connecting scientists to public conversations around their expertise. [12] [13] She also launched COMPASS's training programs around how scientists can more effectively utilize social media to share their work and engage with a broader audience. [14] [15] During her tenure at COMPASS, she was affiliate staff at the University of Washington in the School of Aquatic & Fisheries Sciences. [14] While working at COMPASS Neeley shared her personal experience in working with family members who were skeptical of climate-change science. [16]

The Story Collider

In 2015, Neeley became the executive director of The Story Collider, a nonprofit organization that brings personal stories inspired by science to the public through live shows and a weekly podcast. The organization also trains scientists on how to employ the tools of storytelling to become better communicators. [17] [18] She has spearheaded efforts in applying storytelling to more traditionally academic forms of communication, curating a collection of "Conservation stories from the front lines" for PLOS Biology. [19] She has spoken about the importance of storytelling for science at a number of universities and organizations, including the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the University of Washington College of the Environment's Bevan Series, Yale University, and at Northwestern University. [20] [21] [22] [23] In the policy arena, she has contributed a position paper on the use of narrative persuasion to help scientists ethically navigate the world of decision making at the Institute on Science for Global Policy in partnership with Sigma Xi. [24] She has also contributed her expertise to providing recommendations for how to have better conversations around the COVID-19 pandemic. [25] [26]

Neeley has recorded stories of her own for The Story Collider, including a story about a field expedition gone awry during her time as an undergraduate and another about her colleagues forgetting her while working on coral conservation in Fiji. [27] [28]

Personal life

Neeley is married to Ed Yong, science journalist at The Atlantic. [29] [30] They occasionally collaborate on speaking engagements. [23] [29]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Storytelling</span> Social and cultural sharing of stories

Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view. The term "storytelling" can refer specifically to oral storytelling but also broadly to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donna Haraway</span> Scholar in the field of science and technology studies

Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Zimmer</span> Science writer and blogger

Carl Zimmer is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity. The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He is a fellow at Yale University's Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio's Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.

The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is a nonprofit scientific public charitable organization. The organization's mission is to promote the use of science to inform decision-making and advance biology for the benefit of science and society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nalini Nadkarni</span> American ecologist

Nalini Nadkarni (1954) is an American forest ecologist who pioneered the study of Costa Rican rain forest canopies. Using mountain climbing equipment to make her ascent, Nadkarni first took an inventory of the canopy in 1981, followed by two more inventories in 1984. She is also known with a characteristic nickname, «the queen of the forest canopy».

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy Jackson (scientist)</span> American ecologist, paleobiologist, and conservationist

Jeremy Bradford Cook Jackson is an American ecologist, paleobiologist, and conservationist. He is an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, and visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. He studies threats and solutions to human impacts on the environment and the ecology and evolution of tropical seas. Jackson has more than 170 scientific publications and 11 books, with nearly 40,000 citations listed on Google Scholar.

Marine Conservation Institute is a tax-exempt nonprofit ocean conservation organization working to identify and protect vulnerable ocean ecosystems worldwide. The organization is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with offices in Washington, D.C., and Glen Ellen, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorceta Taylor</span> American environmentalist

Dorceta E. Taylor is an American environmental sociologist known for her work on both environmental justice and racism in the environmental movement. She is the senior associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Yale School of the Environment, as well as a professor of environmental justice. Prior to this, she was the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan's School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), where she also served as the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice. Taylor's research has ranged over environmental history, environmental justice, environmental policy, leisure and recreation, gender and development, urban affairs, race relations, collective action and social movements, green jobs, diversity in the environmental field, food insecurity, and urban agriculture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Yong</span> British science journalist (born 1981)

Edmund Soon-Weng Yong is a British-American science journalist and author. In 2021, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series on the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the author of two books: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (2016) and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (2022).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacquelyn Gill</span> Paleoecologist

Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist and assistant professor of climate science at the University of Maine. She has worked on such as the relationship between megafauna and vegetation in the Pleistocene, and the sediment cores of Jamaica. Gill is also a science communicator on climate change.

<i>The Story Collider</i> American non-profit

The Story Collider is a US-based non-profit group dedicated to telling true, personal stories about science. Their mission is to empower both scientists and nonscientists alike with the skills they need to tell these stories and share them through their live shows and podcast, with the goal of exploring the human side of science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kate Marvel</span> American climate scientist and communicator

Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and science writer based in New York City. She is a senior scientist at Project Drawdown and was formerly an associate research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia Engineering's Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Duke University Marine Laboratory</span> Research facility and campus of Duke University on Pivers Island

The Duke University Marine Laboratory is a research facility and campus of Duke University on Piver's Island, near Beaufort and the Outer Banks, North Carolina specializing in studying marine biology. It is part of the Nicholas School of the Environment's Division of Marine Science and Conservation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Gates</span> American marine biologist (1962–2018)

Ruth Deborah Gates was the Director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and the first woman to be President of the International Society for Reef Studies. Her research was dedicated to understanding coral reef ecosystems, specifically coral-algal symbiosis and the capacity for corals to acclimatize under future climate change conditions. Doctor Gates is most accredited with looking at coral biology and human-assisted coral evolution, known as super corals, as notably seen in the documentary Chasing Coral, available on Netflix.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Lips</span> US herpetologist

Karen R. Lips is a Professor of Biology at University of Maryland, College Park. Lips' work in the 1990s eventually contributed to the identification of the chytrid fungus as the primary cause of frog decline worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate communication</span> Environmental and science communication

Climate communication or climate change communication is a field of environmental communication and science communication focused on discussing the causes, nature and effects of anthropogenic climate change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julie A. Robinson (biologist)</span>

Julie A. Robinson is the Chief Scientist for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA and was previously Chief Scientist for the International Space Station Program for over a twelve years, with a background in both the physical and biological sciences.

Nyawira A. Muthiga is an African conservation zoologist who is Director of the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association Marine Programme in Kenya. She is a conservation scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christine Figgener</span> Marine Biologist

Christine Figgener is a German marine conservation biologist, author, science communicator, and ocean advocate recognized for her work in sea turtle conservation, the fight against plastic pollution, and the empowerment of women in STEM. She is best known for documenting the removal of a plastic straw from a sea turtle's nose in a YouTube video that went viral in 2015. This video, which was featured in popular media outlets such as National Geographic, HuffPost, The New York Times, ABC News, and CNN, highlighted the dangers of plastic pollution on marine wildlife and was a catalyst for the global anti-straw movement that led to several straw bans by businesses such as Starbucks, Disney, and Alaska Airlines.

Sarah Myhre is a climate scientist who uses geology to analyze ancient marine ecosystems and how they reacted to sudden climate changes in Earth's history. She is also an outspoken advocate for both social justice and science, emphasizing that climate change must be tackled alongside misogyny and social injustice. Myhre strives to help those most affected by climate change, but who lack the platform to speak. Myhre is also a founding board member of 500 Women Scientists, an organization that aims to make science more inclusive.

References

  1. Maddie Sofia (January 14, 2020). "Your Brain On Storytelling : Short Wave" (Podcast). NPR . Retrieved 2021-06-02.
  2. Sirois, Cheri (April 25, 2024). "Creating connections when we talk about science". Cell (Interview). 187 (9). Cell Press: 2120–2123. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2024.03.043.
  3. symisun.com, SymiSun* -. "People - Rosenthal Lab - Mate Choice and Evolutionary Genetics". swordtail.tamu.edu. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  4. Communications Trainings to Enhance Marine Protected Area Network Development and Effectiveness in Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PDF) (Report). 2009.
  5. "Sea lovers say coral is too precious to wear". today.com. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  6. "Corals in the Red –.The State of Corals and Recommendations for Recovery". docplayer.net. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  7. Neeley, Liz (2016). "Toot Your Own Horn: Self-Promotion in Social Media". In Wilcox, Christie; Brookshire, Bethany; Goldman, Jason G. (eds.). Science blogging: the essential guide. Yale University Press. ISBN   978-0300197556. OCLC   920017519.
  8. Neeley, Liz (2013-10-30). "Risk communication in social media". In Joseph Arvai; Louie Rivers III (eds.). Effective Risk Communication. Taylor & Francis. pp. 169–190. doi:10.4324/9780203109861-17. ISBN   9780203109861.
  9. "National Environmental Monitoring Conference - NEMC". www.nemc.us. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  10. "Elizabeth Neeley > People and Organizations at YSM | Yale School of Medicine". medicine.yale.edu. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  11. "COMPASS | Our Mission & History". COMPASS | USA | Science Communication. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  12. Smith, Brooke; Baron, Nancy; English, Chad; Galindo, Heather; Goldman, Erica; McLeod, Karen; Miner, Meghan; Neeley, Elizabeth (2013-04-30). "COMPASS: Navigating the Rules of Scientific Engagement". PLOS Biology. 11 (4): e1001552. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001552 . ISSN   1544-9173. PMC   3640098 . PMID   23637575.
  13. "Science Communication at a Tipping Point : Soapbox Science". blogs.nature.com. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  14. 1 2 McClain, Craig; Neeley, Liz (2014). "A critical evaluation of science outreach via social media: its role and impact on scientists". F1000Research. 3: 300. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.5918.2 . ISSN   2046-1402. PMC   4376169 . PMID   25866620.
  15. "Assembling (Science) Networks Online | COMPASS | USA | Science Communication". COMPASS | USA | Science Communication. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  16. Achenbach, Joel (2023-04-09). "Opinion | Why science is so hard to believe". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2024-10-10.
  17. Locker, Melissa (2015-12-06). "Listen to this: Story Collider reveals the human stories behind the science". The Guardian. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  18. "About us". The Story Collider. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  19. Gross, Liza; Hettinger, Annaliese; Moore, Jonathan W.; Neeley, Liz (February 2018). "Conservation stories from the front lines". PLOS Biology. 16 (2): e2005226. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2005226 . ISSN   1545-7885. PMC   5798755 . PMID   29401208.
  20. BeckmanInstitute (2017-10-27), "The Power of Personal Stories About Science" - Story Collider's Liz Neeley (Lecture) , retrieved 2018-07-31
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  22. "Science, Sense-making, and Storytelling: The Graduate School - Northwestern University". www.tgs.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  23. 1 2 Shelton, Jim (2019-09-25). "Neeley and Yong extol the power of narrative in science writing". YaleNews. Retrieved 2019-10-31.
  24. Neeley, Liz (August 2015). "Training in Narrative Persuasion for Ethical, Effective Science Communication". Communicating Science for Policy (PDF) (Report). Institute on Science for Global Policy (ISGP). pp. 23–33. Retrieved July 31, 2018.
  25. Neeley, Liz (2020-03-31). "How to Talk About the Coronavirus". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2021-06-02.
  26. Renken, Elena (11 April 2020). "How Stories Connect And Persuade Us: Unleashing The Brain Power Of Narrative". NPR.org. Retrieved 2021-06-02.
  27. "In the Field: Stories about venturing into the wild". The Story Collider. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  28. "Invisibility: Stories about hiding in plain sight". The Story Collider. Retrieved 2018-07-31.
  29. 1 2 "The Atlantic's Ed Yong visits UW as fall science writer in residence". news.wisc.edu. Retrieved 2019-10-31.
  30. "Liz Neeley on Instagram: "This guy... AND #elephants!!! . . . . #zimbabwe #waterhole #honeymoon #victoriafalls #nofilter"". Instagram. Archived from the original on 2021-12-26. Retrieved 2019-10-31.