I’m starting a blog! (“Journal club, simply put”)

Hello everybody! I recently have taken an interest in the science journalism and communication career space. Through my first 3 years of my PhD, I’ve grown to enjoy writing science and presenting it, whether it be in weekly lab meetings or department seminars.

I have an engineering background and worked in software for a year before I started pursuing my PhD at Rutgers University. I am someone who has subsequently entered academia and became involved in research much later than most of my peers, and I’ve struggled to catch up in field-specific knowledge while rotating in many labs and learning about what I would eventually dedicate my thesis to. As I was getting used to scientific terminology, learning how to read figures, and extracting information out of initially-arcane papers and textbooks, I realized that one of the things I wanted to work on as a student was my ability to communicate science.

In this day and age, I now think it’s especially important to explain science not just to our knowledgeable peers in academia and industry, but to the public as well, in a manner that is easily understandable and refrains from jargon and convoluted figures that appear arcane to the average person. And I understand that scientific journalism and communication are career spaces that already exist to do just that: communicate science to the general public. I recently became interested in these types of careers, and I’m venturing into this space by starting a blog to practice my scientific writing.

There are so many profound and interesting studies that I hear about, whether on Twitter or through my colleagues and friends. Within all the potential jargon and complicated figures lies extremely interesting research that I think everyone deserves to get excited about. I will be writing about these studies — not just their results but also their methods and how they arrive at their findings.

Journal clubs are meetings with my colleagues where we choose a paper to talk about at length, discussing the overall findings as well as scrutinizing the methods in order to make sense of it all. I’m very excited to start this blog, titled “Journal club, simply put”, in the spirit of these journal club meetings to make sense of scientific papers.

Here is the first installment, and I’m extremely excited to begin writing science for my friends, family, and anybody else I happen to reach. I hope I can get you all just as excited about science as I am!