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As a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, Celia Smits probed the mysteries of fruit fly development, searching for the secrets of how life organizes itself. Yet, as she imagined her future, she yearned for a way to see her research have a more immediate impact on the people around her. Her desire to connect her work with the needs of the community led her on an unexpected detour—into a staff position in the New Jersey Senate as an Eagleton Science and Politics Fellow, advising legislators on science policy.
The opportunity has given Smits new insights into how science matters to society—and where future research might contribute the most. “One of the difficult things about being a scientist is coming up with something new that no one has thought about before,” she says. “Being in this space opens up a lot of questions. You really see the limits of where we know things and where we don’t know things.”
Smits encountered one of those areas of uncertainty when she started working on legislation to regulate a group of synthetic chemicals known as PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances). PFAS are used in a breathtaking variety of modern products, from cosmetics and nonstick cookware to heart stents, firefighting foam, and lithium-ion batteries for cell phones and electric cars. But these long-lasting substances—often dubbed “forever chemicals”—are also now recognized as potentially hazardous, inspiring efforts to limit their use and to further investigate their health effects.
The overlap between scientific research and social concerns has given rise to a movement known as “civic science.”
Since their introduction in the 1940s, PFAS have accumulated in the environment, in the food chain, and in the human body, where some forms have been linked with health risks including cancers, elevated cholesterol, and a reduced response to vaccines. With more than 12,000 types of PFAS created so far, much is still unknown about them. Which forms are most harmful? How much exposure causes health effects? What are the practical alternatives to PFAS? And how should we weigh the cost of cleanup and replacement versus the cost and risk of leaving things as they are? These are questions that scientists can’t answer alone, and that policymakers can’t answer alone, either. Policymakers need scientists working with them to help assess evolving evidence and competing analyses.
Even determining which chemicals qualify as PFAS is contentious. Smits found that legislators and staff in the New Jersey Senate were eager to engage with the scientific evidence about these chemicals, but they didn’t always have the resources to evaluate it. “People can present evidence that says whatever opinion they want to present,” she notes. “It’s very important to be able to discern what is the most important or the most relevant piece.” Drawing on her expertise in chemistry and biochemistry, Smits helped legislators assess the consequences of potential definitions of PFAS in a bill to phase out the use of those chemicals in certain consumer products. That bill is now under consideration in the State Senate and Assembly.
Just as today’s scientific research increasingly relies on drawing together ideas from diverse disciplines, untangling complex science policy issues like PFAS regulation requires broad collaboration. Solutions require input not only from scientists, but also from nonprofits, community members, and philanthropic groups.
Such broad-based collaborations are proving especially fruitful at the state level, because states are often able to experiment with new policies in emerging areas of science and technology even while consensus remains elusive at the federal level. With the input of scientists like Smits, states are becoming increasingly valuable laboratories for developing policy solutions that draw on the best available evidence, applying it to yield maximum public benefit.
The overlap between scientific research and social concerns has given rise to a growing, collaborative movement known as “civic science.” It is an umbrella term for current efforts to develop programs and interdisciplinary scholarship related to the societal aspects of science; to foster connections between science and democratic decision-making; and to build networks of people—in scientific institutions and outside of them—working to ensure that science reaches its full potential to serve the public good. Civic science is about breaking down institutional and systemic barriers, so that people across diverse communities can participate in the scientific process and use scientific insights to address their most important priorities.
Many scientists, like Smits, are eager to connect their work in a laboratory, in the field, or behind a desk to serving humanity as a whole. At the same time, many people outside of research institutions—in museums, public policy, philanthropy, journalism—are building bridges between science and other parts of society, pulling together the kind of wide-ranging expertise needed to solve complex social problems. Civic science enhances the value to society of basic research while exploring other ways scientists and engineers can use their knowledge to improve people’s lives, whether through policy, engaging with their local communities, or making science more welcoming and accessible.
States and territories are critical sites for these exchanges in the United States, because they hold the authority to navigate consequential science and technology issues while operating on a smaller, more nimble scale than the federal government. State-level policies are now addressing pressing problems in public health, artificial intelligence, and climate change. These issues are developing too rapidly to await national-level solutions. Civic science and novel science policies in state governments can draw from policy ideas and innovations happening at the local level. Such experiments can also inform efforts in other states and inform legislation at the federal level. The impact of state-level policy can be substantial: the California Air Resources Board, which sets pollution standards for the state, has influenced automotive emissions policy and industry standards globally.
Policymakers need scientists working with them to help assess evolving evidence and competing analyses.
The recent Supreme Court decision overturning Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council further amplified the urgency and opportunity of developing state-level science and technology policies. For the past 40 years, “Chevron deference” allowed federal agencies to interpret ambiguous areas of federal regulations by drawing on the specialized scientific training of their professional staff. The 2024 Supreme Court ruling means that, going forward, more of those ambiguities will be resolved through judicial processes. In the future, states will have more opportunities and obligation to provide stronger leadership in developing evidence-informed policies that are guided by the best available scientific knowledge and expertise.
Only 4 percent of state legislators nationwide have a background in science, technology, engineering, or healthcare. As states face increasingly complex scientific and technological issues, many organizations within and outside of government are developing programs to ensure that state legislatures have access to relevant scientific expertise. The National Conference of State Legislatures is helping to coordinate similar science-access efforts nationally.
The Eagleton Science and Politics Fellowship in New Jersey follows one increasingly common approach: placing scientists and engineers from a range of disciplines in advisory positions to support state legislatures. Some of these programs are administered through universities, as is the Eagleton program based at Rutgers University, others through a state scientific council or an independent nonprofit. In Missouri, a group of graduate students created a fellowship program and a nonprofit organization to administer it, the Missouri Science and Technology Policy Initiative, as a means to provide nonpartisan science policy research for members of the Missouri General Assembly. Six states—California, Connecticut, Idaho, and New York, in addition to Missouri and New Jersey—have launched year-long, Ph.D.-level science advising fellowship programs in a similar manner.
These science policy fellowship programs have received support from coalitions of philanthropic funders, led nationally by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. In a vote of confidence, California allocated $31.5 million between 2019–2023 to operate, endow, and secure the future of its state legislature science policy fellowship program managed by the California Council on Science and Technology. The California Legislature has frequently acknowledged the value of the program. In New Jersey, Matt Peterson, the associate executive director of the New Jersey Senate Majority Office, says that in just six years, Eagleton Science Policy Fellows have become “an indispensable resource.”
Civic science is demonstrating its value as states confront complex, fast-moving challenges. The regulation of artificial intelligence is a prominent example. While Congress is slowly debating bills to set guardrails for AI tools, state lawmakers are passing them. To date, more than 60 state AI bills have been enacted out of 762 proposed AI bills in 45 states compared to just 114 proposed AI bills in Congress according to MultiState, a government affairs firm. In May, Colorado became the first state to pass a broad AI consumer-protection law. The Utah legislature recently approved the Artificial Intelligence Policy Act and created a new state Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. Other states are joining Utah in considering the creation of “regulatory sandboxes,” collaborative projects that bring together researchers and legislators to explore the advantages and drawbacks of specific policies regarding AI and other technology.
In response to generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT and Gemini, 13 states enacted laws this year to address AI-generated deepfakes in elections. Another Eagleton Science and Politics Fellow, Erin K. Reagan, arranged a hearing that influenced proposed New Jersey legislation to regulate deepfakes—deceptive images, audio, or video created using AI tools. The hearing included a variety of experts, including a computer scientist, a communications scholar studying “cheap fakes” (deceptive images easily created with low-tech editing tools), an expert in First Amendment issues, and a researcher studying intimate partner violence. Based on that expert input, the bill was revised to close potential loopholes—for instance, specifying different forms that the solicitation of deepfakes might take. Several scholars noted that, without Reagan’s invitation, it would not have occurred to them to share their expertise with policymakers.
One of the authors of this article, Michael Akinwumi, is an applied mathematical scientist with firsthand experience in civic science. He has worked on responsible AI systems, designed to protect privacy and promote equity; he is now developing guidelines for AI regulation that can inform state legislatures across the country. Akinwumi has observed that well-informed engagement from state regulators can stimulate AI innovation rather than stifling it. For example, efforts to ensure fairness, accuracy, safety, and reliability in AI systems that make crucial recommendations—such as who gets approved for a bank loan—have driven advances in theoretical computer science. These efforts have inspired research in explainability (summarizing the process of AI so humans can understand it) and interpretability (revealing the internal steps AI uses to arrive at answers).
In addition to AI legislation, civic science is helping shape policies addressing COVID-19 and future pandemics, climate change, environmental toxins, and gene editing. Crafting effective approaches to these complex areas requires more than scientific and technical knowledge. It also requires sensitivity to public values, and to issues of inequality, polarization, and trust.
The Civic Science Fellows program, which brought together the authors of this article, was created in 2020 to improve the ways that institutions, including state governments, draw on different kinds of expertise to address emerging problems. It connects bench and social scientists with journalists, community groups, content creators, public-interest organizations, and funders. Through the fellows program, organizations confronting science-related challenges (ranging from research institutions to museums and community-based nonprofits) receive grants to hire fellows from a wide spectrum of disciplines and backgrounds. Fellows aim to learn from other experts, develop creative solutions, advance knowledge about what works in civic science, and build trusted relationships that form a foundation for ongoing collaborations.
Some of the fellows work with policymakers; others work with scientific organizations to help them grapple with ethics, public outreach, and social implications in fields ranging from neuroscience to quantum computing, from clinical algorithms to synthetic biology. Other fellows approach civic science issues from a community perspective by engaging with people who have not traditionally been included in science so that they, too, can have a voice in shaping policy, using science to address their priorities, and influencing how researchers ask questions and apply their results. Akinwumi is a civic science fellow; his work to support state-level efforts to assure that AI is implemented in safe and equitable ways is one example of how fellows projects weave together different kinds of expertise.
Civic science is helping shape policies addressing future pandemics, climate change, environmental toxins, and more.
A goal of many civic science efforts is providing ways for local insights and concerns to migrate up to the state and territory level. Civic science fellows Andrea Isabel López, a public health researcher, and Angélica Valdés Valderrama, a social scientist, are studying the efforts of Ciencia Puerto Rico, a nonprofit science-advocacy group working to build relationships between the scientific community and community leaders in Puerto Rico. Ciencia Puerto Rico played an influential role early in the COVID-19 pandemic when the group developed local, culturally relevant communication strategies about the value and safety of vaccination. Their strategies were later adopted by the Puerto Rican House of Representatives. These evidence-based approaches reached more than 200,000 people, including the territory’s most vulnerable populations, contributing to Puerto Rico having some of the highest vaccination rates in the U.S. by fall 2021.
In another example spotlighting the value of local engagement, civic science fellow Elyse Aurbach, a neuroscientist and science communicator, worked with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to explore ways state universities and other higher-education institutions can communicate more effectively with local communities. She highlighted examples from university extension offices, which are often funded by state legislatures with the specific goal of bringing the benefits of research findings into communities. Several years ago, the University of Missouri’s Office of Extension and Engagement conducted listening tours across Missouri. Community input then led the university to refocus its extension programming around the areas of economic opportunity, educational excellence, and health and well-being.
The University of Missouri’s focus on engagement proved crucial during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. County engagement specialists with the university drew on existing relationships to give personalized health information to rural small businesses and to help initiate volunteer efforts to make deliveries from food pantries and grocery stores.
People working in civic science often describe themselves as “boundary spanners” who speak the languages of science and policy, and also of the specific communities they come from. Andrew George is one example, and he is committed to supporting other boundary spanners. His efforts began a decade ago while he was studying molecular biology at Duke University, where he helped create a fellowship for graduate students in North Carolina to contribute to public policy. Then as a civic science fellow, he worked with Sigma Xi, an international scientific honor society, to create an online platform for scientists to find opportunities to participate in state-level policymaking while also engaging with the public.
Since his fellowship ended last year, George has been working with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, a public-private coalition founded by the North Carolina General Assembly. There, he has created a community ambassador program to draw people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds and provide training and job-placement for work in creating vaccines and medications. The program also supports medical-related education and apprenticeships for college students, high schoolers, and underserved local populations.
Although civic science takes on many forms, its core mission is always the same. “When you add the word ‘civic’ to ‘science’ you put in the missing piece for science as it serves the public,” said Mariette DiChristina, dean of Boston University’s College of Communications and an advisor to the Civic Science Fellows, at a recent discussion at the British Library. “There are challenging, multidisciplinary, strident issues of the day, from climate change to public health to how to incorporate AI, where the answers aren’t always what the science says,” DiChristina continues. “The answers are often what we decide to do as a community. That’s where the civic comes in.”
This article is part of a series, Science at the Ballot Box, which is an initiative by the Aspen Institute, published in partnership with Nautilus.
Lead image: Flash Vector / Shutterstock
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