Come early ahead of the seminar for a preview of juried projects heading to the ACCelerate Creativity and Innovation Festival taking place Oct. 13-15, 2017, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

Sept. 21 ACCelerate Project: LuminAI
LuminAI is a dome-based art installation in which participants can engage in collaborative movement improvisation with each other and virtual AI-based dance partners.

Seminar Abstract:

Science communication has evolved rapidly in the past decade; 18-25 year olds do not engage with traditional media in the same way as previous generations. As a result, scientists must go to where the learners are or we cede the audience to click-bait pop science, pseudoscience, and science deniers by default. The majority of online resources for self-directed scientific inquiry are non-interactive presentations of information. With a goal of democratizing science education and facilitating engagement between scientific leaders and the general lay public (who fund the majority of their research), I am a full moderator (one of ~10) of the scientific community /r/science on reddit.com. r/science utilizes internet-based computer-supported cooperative work that includes an “Army” of over 1400 volunteer moderators to allow focused, on-topic discussion of new peer reviewed research science in a public space. This forum for scientific communication also organizes and provides a platform for bidirectional, crowd-sourced conversations with prominent research scientists, has nearly 18 million subscribed readers, and receives between 100k-500k unique IP page views per day. In this endeavor, I work daily with major scientific and media publishing houses, such as AAAS, Nature Publishing Group, Cell Press, the American Chemical Society, NPR, Washington Post, NASA, and PLOS to facilitate communication of discoveries and promote research. We actively collaborate with members of MIT’s Media Lab and others to evaluate our engagement, and are expanding our outreach to leverage the educational opportunities of /r/science with a focus on divisive issues such as transgender health and online radicalization.

Speaker Bio:

In my day job as an assistant professor of Medical Genetics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, I am interested in developing and applying computational methodologies to further our understanding of the genetic basis of human disease. Specifically, I focus on development of novel strategies for identifying and confirming genetic risk factors to complex traits including blood lipid levels, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic traits via ascertainment of dense genetic (specifically, whole genome/exome sequenced and whole genome imputed datasets) and phenotypic data.

Outside of genetics, digital era science education and outreach is one of my passions. I am a full moderator (one of ~10) of the scientific community /r/science onreddit.com. This community-run forum for scientific communication facilitates bidirectional crowd-sourced interviews with prominent research scientists, has nearly 18 million subscribed readers, and receives between 100k-500k unique IP page views per day.