AE doctoral student Natalie Schloeder has been named the winner in TechTalks, a multi-tiered science communications competition.

The final leg of the months-long competition came  March 24 when five finalists gave their own take on an open-ended challenge: "Why society needs science."

Schloeder's six-minute presentation, "How Thinking Gets You Pregnant... and Why Society Needs Science" gave a humorous and thought-provoking perspective on the pitfalls of unscientific thinking.

Joining Schloeder in the finals round were Tessa Solomon-Lane, a neuroscience doctoral student from Georgia State University; Zev Greenberg, an undergraduate Georgia Tech MSE student, Mahdi Al Husseinii, an undergraduate Georgia Tech BME student; and Nick Selby, an undergraduate Georgia Tech ME student.

In the lab at Georgia Tech, Schloeder is working on a NASA-funded project involving Electronegative Ion Thrusters. She expects to defend sometime in the next year.

In her TechTalks presentation Monday night, she was a storyteller, inviting listeners to remember the first time they used science to explain their world.

"Your first reference to science is probably your parents, because they explain things to you when your mind is open and very curious," Schloeder said in a phone interview this week. "Mine came when I was five, and my mother was pregnant."

"I asked her why she was fat, and she said she was going to have a baby. That didn't explain why she was fat -- I didn't know the baby was inside her - so I kept asking her where babies come from. She tried to explain without being explicit."

Her mother's slimmed down version of the complicated biology involved three conditions - none of them scientific.

"First, she said, you had to be older than 5. Second, you had to be married. And third, you had to be thinking about babies. A lot."

Schloeder wasn't buying it. Not entirely, anyway.

"I knew the part about being really old wasn't true. And I knew you didn't have to be married, but the last part really stressed me out, because I was thinking about babies a lot and I still didn't know why she was fat..."

At this point, Schloeder laughs at her misplaced anxiety, but she is quick to bring her point back into sharp focus:

"It reminds me of the 16th century, when the theory of spontaneous generation tried to explain why flies came out of rotting meat. People didn't have a scientific explanation, so they just put something together that seemed to explain things," she said. "It didn't."

That danger is always present, she said, if people do not probe for facts.

"If we don't have science, we are all five-year-olds, because we want answers but we don't have what science gives us."

A video of Schloeder's talk will be released soon (and will be posted here). Meanwhile, the New Jersey native will be focusing on her work in the High Power Electric Propulsion Lab under the guidance of her mentor, Dr. Mitchell Walker.

"When the video is available, I'm going to show it to my parents," she said. "They will love it."

TechTalks is an annual presentation competition based on the idea that effective science communication is fundamental, not only to how scientists interact with each other, but also to how science interfaces with our larger society. Find out more.