Science Communication, Education and Outreach Manager
ARC Centre of Excellence in Optical Microcombs for Breakthrough Science (COMBS)
Rachael Vorwerk's journey started with a children’s book about the hippocampus and has grown to leading multimillion-dollar research campaigns while amplifying the voices of scientists.
This Transcript is AI-Generated
Rachael Vorwerk: I think for the general public, the role that science can play is just really reminding them to be curious and that we don't have the answers to everything. Great
Chai: science communication makes complex ideas come to life at its best. It connects with people, influences, key decision makers. And delivers
Rachael Vorwerk: vital information, highlighting researchers and getting them to write their own stories.
I just think that is where science communication is working. I also love documentaries and stories about science are just, they're just so powerful.
Micah: In this episode, we're highlighting real world successes in science communication, exploring how humanizing scientists. Helps the public connect and examining the messages and mediums shaping the future.
Chai: I'm your new co-host, Chai Nussbaumer.
Micah: And I'm Micah Schweitzer. This is season two of Balancing the Future from Metler Toledo.
Chai: On this show, we delve into the world of science and technology and explore its transformative impact. On our lives.
Micah: Before we jump into the conversation today, Chai, I'd love for our listeners to learn a little bit more about you.
Chai: Yeah, for sure. So I've worked at METTLER TOLEDO for almost seven years in lab marketing. So this means that I get to communicate with scientists and researchers and really let them know what the company's all about.
Micah: And I understand you also have a media background.
Chai: I worked in local TV news and I covered political news as well as the weather. After listening to season one, I can really say it's great to be a part of this podcast
Micah: and really excited to have you on the show.
Rachael Vorwerk: I hadn't really thought of science being that creative before that moment, and I, I know you can be creative in sort of the way you design experiments and everything, but for me it. Almost became like science and art combined.
Chai: That science communications expert Rachael Vorwerk, she's talking about a moment from her college days when she created Where Do Hippos Camp, A picture book for five-year-olds that taught them about a part of their brain called the hippocampus.
This book had a profound effect on her career path. I
Rachael Vorwerk: didn't even know science communication existed before that, and then left that subject and thought, yeah, okay. I know exactly what I wanna be now,
Micah: and maybe it's important at this point to say that that communication, I mean, when I hear communication, I just sort of somehow automatically think words.
But we're not limited to words in science. Communication is what I'm hearing.
Rachael Vorwerk: No. Yeah, we're definitely not. I think it can be anything. It can be any channel or any way of describing science. It can be a podcast. It can be a documentary. It can be, I don't know, like a public lecture. It's all science, communication, anything I guess that makes science more accessible.
Micah: And who's it for?
Rachael Vorwerk: It depends. Sometimes it can be for grant funders. If you're a researcher, it can be for the general public. If you're just trying to raise awareness about your science, it can be for other academics. Say if you're a researcher and you kind of wanna work on more interdisciplinary collaborations, then you know you're gonna need to sort of adapt your language so other disciplines understand can be for policy makers.
Yeah, it's sort of endless
Micah: now. Why can't the facts just speak for themselves?
Rachael Vorwerk: I think because they don't have emotions in them. I've done a bit of psychology research myself as well, and it's just not interesting enough to have facts. We're humans and we like stories and we like emotions. We relate well to them.
So it's just so important to not just relay facts to everyone. I mean, we've all been on the other end of that in a conversation where someone might be rattling off facts to us and statistics, and it's so hard to remember. Information like that when it's just presented to you, and some people are better at that than others, but if you've got a story that you're listening to with sort of facts woven in where you're kind of pairing education with entertainment, then it's just so powerful.
Micah: I had in my own career once an opportunity to talk to a group of researchers about communication, and we got on the topic of emotional resonance and that humans are wired for story and this whole idea, and somebody asked me a question afterwards that I'll never forget. It was I. Aren't we manipulating our audience if we make them feel something?
Whew. That's very much the kind of question I think might come from somebody who really is zeroed in on the facts, like the numbers. Mm-hmm. The data. That's what matters. What would you say if a scientist you're coaching asked a question like that?
Rachael Vorwerk: It feels like a cynical way to come at it from, and maybe, maybe the place it's coming from is a little bit like a bit of a fear of maybe presenting information inaccurately, but I've worked with researchers for a long time and they do really like to obviously have their work presented accurately.
I want that to, but. It's sort of this idea of really needing to meet in the middle because if you do just present very statistics, heavy information without sort of the engaging overtone being considered, it's just, it's not gonna land. I also would argue that. A lot of science communication is about empathy.
For me in particular, putting myself in my audience's shoes to kind of think, oh, well what does the person on the street care about? Science? Or, you know, what does the grant funder, what do they care about science? So could we say that I'm manipulating my audience by empathizing with them? Maybe. But I think, yeah, look, the big vision here is for science to become more accessible.
So if we're gonna make that happen, then we need to be thinking about our audience and what they care about. I.
Micah: Do you think the public has a role to play as an audience? That there's some level of understanding that's incumbent on us? You know, if you look at sort of the average Western educational system, we all have a certain degree of science education in our backgrounds.
Can we rely on that? Or do you need to just sort of assume that you're working with a, a population that is, you know, busy with other thoughts and ideas and priorities in their life?
Rachael Vorwerk: It's a good question. I think I normally err on the side of assuming less knowledge in science than more. The worst thing I think we can do as science communicators is to exclude any audiences or make everyone feel silly for not understanding.
Then you're sort of building this feeling that science is a privileged thing to be able to access, I think for the general public. The role that science can play is just really reminding them to be curious and that we don't have the answers to everything. And it's kind of a weird feeling to sit with sometimes that you don't have a predefined answer or outcome.
And failure is actually an inherently good thing in science 'cause it makes you go to the next level of understanding something more.
Micah: There are so many cases where science or scientific information or findings can sort of cause cognitive dissonance or some kind of friction, whether it be political or emotional, or perhaps even moral for an audience.
How do you navigate that?
Rachael Vorwerk: It's so complicated because yeah, this idea of cognitive dissonance of where you might be a very logical and critical thinker, and we all do it. I'm speaking on behalf of all humans here.
Micah: Yeah, exactly. It's not a scientist versus non-scientist trait.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yeah. So, you know, we know that facts exist, but still our values sometimes come over the top and they sort of wipe all the facts out of our brains.
But, um, even this, I heard once that. You know, your neighbor or family member is likely to have more influence on you than like a qualified scientist. And I feel like that shows cognitive dissonance a lot where again, it's like, you know, facts don't win people over emotion does and trust so. The big question there is how do you navigate that?
I think again, it comes back to empathy of really meeting your audience where they are, understanding what their values might be, or trying to see what habits they might already have and trying to meet them there.
Chai: Earlier Rachel highlighted just how critical it is to tailor science communication to different audiences, but it's not just about the message who delivers it is also crucial.
Micah: Think back to the COVID-19 pandemic. A time when public health campaigns had to act fast and reach people from all walks of life.
In the US public health organizations teamed up with faith leaders, equipping them with the facts to boost vaccination rates in their communities.
Chai: Meanwhile, in the uk, health officials partnered with soccer clubs, magazines and authors to create eye-catching visuals, pushing for vaccine uptake. Again, it wasn't just about the message, it was also about who delivered it.
Micah: And while Rachel wasn't on the front lines of pandemic communications, she believes the lessons from that time matter just as much. Today,
Rachael Vorwerk: I think what works best is when you just have a lot of. Voices. Covid in particular was a real moment where if you're a researcher and you did have a voice, say you were studying infectious diseases or that's your background, it was so important for those people to stand up and get on Twitter at the time and even get on our daily news updates.
In Australia, we had our chief scientist standing with our Prime Minister sometimes, but also with our sort of state level government representatives as well. To have science and critical facts, I guess, or just facts.
Micah: Mm-hmm.
Rachael Vorwerk: Very clear. Um, and very easy to access.
Micah: You mentioned building trust earlier. I think Covid was so interesting because we got to see the scientific process in real time and a compressed amount of real time.
Yes. In a way that directly are affected our day-to-day lives, which is not. Typical. We don't experience science quite at our fingertips like that. And the question I have around trust is this, at the beginning I recall washing my hands so often, you know, that they were sort of getting chapped and dry and and red.
Yeah. And then one day came the news that actually handwashing was not the way to prevent. I mean, it's still important, but it was not the tool for preventing the spread of covid. It was masks. Mm-hmm. And so in some sense, the science was wrong.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yeah.
Micah: This is challenging, I think, I mean, that's the nature of science.
Science is not right from the get go. Mm-hmm. It's a, it's an iterative process, getting closer and closer to understanding a system or a situation.
Rachael Vorwerk: I really think that was so tough for the communicators at the time, because it might seem like. The researchers were trying to trick us earlier on, or that they were really barking up the wrong tree of wash your hands.
Oh, but now wear masks. The other really interesting thing about Covid, and particularly in terms of science communication about it, was that we had a direct statistic that we could look at every single day. As to how we were all performing as a group. The daily stat of there are X amount of cases of covid in this state at the moment, you know there are X amount of people in hospital ICU right now.
What a stark way to represent data that we can all relate to. That then kind of links directly to the research into finding a vaccine, the thing in science communication to get people to care about it. Is to link it back to things that the audience cares about. What did we care about during Covid? Well, we didn't wanna get covid ourselves and we didn't want our family and friends to, I guess end up in ICU or to get it either.
So it's just meeting the audience again, where they are and the sort of common denominator of what they care about is the way that you can do effective science communication, in my opinion.
Micah: Let's talk a bit about the areas where you've been active as a science communicator. I understand that during Covid, you were working on a high speed internet chip project, and maybe this could serve as an example of a place where your science communication made a real world difference.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yeah. Yeah. It was a really interesting story that I worked on with our researchers at Monash, Swinburne and RMIT Unis in all in Melbourne, Australia, where the lead author Bill Corcoran found that he could basically open up lots of different, we'll call them highways on a chip. Our internet normally travels through sort of one wavelength of light in our optical fibers.
Basically the researchers found that they could create this chip that was able to open up lots of different colors of light and send data down simultaneously, down lots of different colors of light at once. And why do we care about that? Well. It really helps to increase our internet data speeds. So it was just at the start of Covid and um, the article was coming out in Nature Communications and we all thought, oh my goodness, you know, how are we gonna cut through the noise of covid right now?
Yes, rightfully it is taking center stage in the media. Um, but then Bill, one of our researchers, was so clever and he put this quote together and he said, now more than ever. We are relying on the internet. We are trying to contact our loved ones via Zoom, and Zoom has just the amount of data that we're using has gone through the roof where everyone is taking meetings online now.
How's that for an example of relating I. Uh, data and us caring about the internet to the problem at hand. My role in that was to kind of bring together lots of university teams, university media teams at three different unis, and I coordinated, well, all of us worked together, but we had the media team from Swinburne, Monash, and RMIT, and me all working together to write three separate media releases from our different unis, which is a very weird thing to do.
Normally you just have one media release that goes out. But basically we were, each media release profiled the researcher from their specific uni. And you know, it doesn't seem like the greatest success from the outside, but the biggest moment was when we got an article in BBC World News where, you know, it said.
Australian researchers from three unis have broken the record for the world's first internet at 44 Terabits per second, which is equivalent to a thousand high definition movies in a split second via a chip the size of Y finger nail. And so. The research is incredibly impressive on its own, but I'm very proud of the way we coordinated the media release.
So, you know, BBC World News celebrated three of the key researchers and not just one. That's kind of unheard of to have multiple unis represented. So that's a big win for us. We're profiling lots of researchers at once, but also incredible research
Micah: and tying it to the present moment.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Micah: That's, that's consumed everything. That's sucked. All the oxygen outta the room in the media space.
Rachael Vorwerk: Exactly. Yeah. It was credit to Bill for coming up with that quote 'cause he just paved away in the noise for us to exist in that landscape as well.
Chai: One of Rachel's key audiences. Is Grant funders. A few years ago she worked with a team to land a 72 million Australian dollar investment.
Micah: Their innovation is to shrink an ultra precise measurement tool that's currently two meters tall by one meter wide, down to a size, small enough to fit inside a watch, sort of like how room sized computers have shrunk down to smartphones this time with a device that can measure pretty much anything.
Rachael Vorwerk: We could help astronomers find earth-like planets. We could make biomedical diagnostic devices much more accurate, so we could even breathe into a device and it would measure the gases in our breath to see what symptoms we'd have before they even arise for diseases. Just crazy stuff. Wow.
Chai: Instead of relying solely on traditional grant application processes, Rachel helped lead a creative communications campaign.
It focused on real world impact, built momentum, and most importantly, told a compelling story about what this device could do.
Micah: In the end, they secured the funding. We can't say for certain, the comms campaign sealed the deal, but it's a clear example of the kind of creativity, science, communication demands, just like Rachel talked about at the start of the episode.
Chai: So what about today in 2025, what aspects of science communication should we be focusing on?
Rachael Vorwerk: Well, I just feel like everyone is talking about AI at the moment and language generation models. I think that is where we need a lot of help to use this new technology and figure out. Its limitations still, and to figure out what role it currently plays and what it might play in the future.
As far as I'm concerned, like the best way to navigate that right now is to just literally experiment with these tools. Um, but yeah, I, I would be more than happy to hear more about. Sort of the limitations and, you know, the media outlet, the conversation is so good at explainer pieces like this. Um, I'm not getting commission from this by saying it, but I, I just really love their work 'cause they get researchers to write articles themselves and they, they work with editors there.
It's really, it's a great way to build critical thinking skills in the general public. These articles are written in a really accessible way and they, they relate to our everyday lives.
Micah: Do you see anywhere where science communication is really working right now?
Rachael Vorwerk: Yeah, I think again, highlighting researchers and getting them to write their own stories.
I just think that is where science communication is working. I. I also love documentaries and stories about science are just, they're just so powerful. Particularly, you know, the best science communication is when you don't even know that you're learning about science. It's sort of sneakily hidden in and not even sneakily.
That sounds manipulative, but you know when science is in something and you don't even know you're learning about it. 'cause it's just engaging enough on its own. That's the best science communication.
Micah: Yeah, because curiosity has been sparked in the end, I.
Rachael Vorwerk: Exactly curiosity. You're, you're curious, you're inspired and you Yeah, exactly.
It's just sparked something in you that, it just must be a really great story comes back to storytelling.
Micah: How do you avoid the risks around dangerous oversimplification or sensationalizing research or findings?
Rachael Vorwerk: I'd say it's one of our biggest challenges in communicating science because I work in sort of a research center and I have access to researchers very easily When I'm communicating their work and maybe writing a media release or a, an impact piece about their work.
What often happens is that I interview the researchers, I analyze that and I write it into a piece and I try to make it really engaging. Right. But. Then I go back to the researcher and show it to them, and there is such a sort of moment of compromise there where the researchers say, no, this is really too far.
And so it's a real push and pull moment there because then I say, well, yeah, great. I agree. I'm on your team. I want it to be accurate, but. It's still gotta be engaging. So those three paragraphs you just wrote in as a heading aren't gonna work either. So we made in the middle. I'm lucky that I can work with researchers directly and they can sort of pre-approve things before they go live.
For journalists, I think it's really important for them to. Yeah, just I guess take really good notes when they're speaking to researchers. It also comes back to the communicators, the science communicators in centers or universities in writing a really good, accurate, robust media release in the first place.
So journalists have a great sort of foundation to work from in terms of accurate content.
Micah: So another audience that you're tailoring something for.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yes, exactly. And the media releases they need to be written with the scientists and the researchers so they're accurate from the beginning.
Micah: Mm-hmm. Because I imagine if there's room for misinterpretation, then you're opening up a lot of risk.
I.
Rachael Vorwerk: Exactly. Yeah. And credit to the researchers that I work with, they're always sort of thinking a few steps ahead and thinking, oh no, don't say it in that way. That could be misconstrued or, 'cause when you are the one writing it, sometimes you lose perspective. It's always good to have someone sort of looking over your work as well to make sure that it won't be misconstrued.
Micah: Do you think that scientists, researchers have. A responsibility to communicate their research to the public, to have it be broadly understood?
Rachael Vorwerk: Yes, I do. I completely think that because a lot of our research funding is from taxpayers money, so. I think there is an absolute responsibility for researchers to be talking about what the taxpayer's money is going towards.
Yes, there are these challenges of researchers not having enough time to communicate. I. Their work. I guess it shows the value of investing in a science communicator. The more we can bridge this divide of the us versus them of the sort of the stereotype of the kind of like elite scientist or researcher who doesn't talk to the general public very often it's not good.
It doesn't lend itself well to science being accessible. It kind of creates this divided us and them thing between researchers and the public.
Micah: Especially given that not all, but certainly a significant portion of scientific research is about tangible societal needs or challenges or improvements.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I agree.
Chai: In some areas there's a public lack of trust in scientists.
Micah: Climate change is a good example. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is real driven by human activity and getting worse. But in the US only about one third of the public believes scientists fully understand its impacts. I.
Chai: This gap in trust also shows up and debates over genetically modified crops, vaccines, and a range of other issues.
Why? It's not just about facts. People often filter information through personal values, political identity, and cultural beliefs.
Micah: This is a tough divide to cross, but Rachel is excited about the new avenues of communication that might open up in the next few years.
Rachael Vorwerk: I think that virtual reality is gonna play a massive part in science communication in the future.
I'm so excited to have VR being more accessible to me as well. I just think in terms of educating people about science. The more we can make the invisible or the the hard to see things accessible, which VR is awesome at, you can basically, you know, design something and get in the veins of your own body and you know, you'll see all the crazy stuff happening in your blood in a virtual reality headset.
I'm also super excited about, and this is sort of my prediction that I've had for a long time, but. Do you know that Black Mirror episode called Band A Snatch? It's a very specific reference. It was on Netflix a few years ago, and it was a choose your own adventure, basically TV episode. All you needed was your remote to kind of choose A or B.
Do you want the protagonist in the story to go and speak to ex colleague on the ride or leave work early, you know, A or B? Which one do you choose? The story would change depending on, you know, which option you chose. I would love to see. Science communicated like that because then it kind of shows this idea of, yeah, science isn't, uh, predetermined.
You don't know where you're gonna end up. And I think that sort of choose your own adventure style can get the non-technical audience in that mindset of, well, we don't know where this is gonna go. That's kind of like. That's science. Right. I'm really excited about sort of those interactive formats becoming more and more accessible.
Micah: What advice would you give to scientists who want to become better at communicating the work they're doing?
Rachael Vorwerk: I do a lot of training with scientists and the, the piece of advice that I give them, just the place to start, is to just put yourself in your audience's shoes, what does your audience care about?
You know, and then, then experiment and practice. Say you are at a barbecue on a Sunday with your family and friends.
Micah: Mm-hmm.
Rachael Vorwerk: Just chat to them about your research and. See when their eyes start to glaze over. That's okay. If it, if they do, maybe they won't. But take note of when people start to lose interest and then you try a new way of communicating your research and over time you get better and better and better at figuring out what.
Your audience cares about, and you'll probably end up finding that real world application where it's sort of the common denominator between your research and what they care about.
Micah: Scientists tend to talk to each other. In a, in a particular language, one might say, because they all speak it and they all understand it and they can convey real and deep information with it.
Um, but scientists are also, you know, people who watch shows on Netflix and, you know, go to barbecues and so forth. Is there a place for a different type of communication between scientists?
Rachael Vorwerk: I'm really excited about this exact thing where it's sort of like, how do we humanize researchers more? I'm sort of running this mini experiment myself in my research center trying to basically make the same kind of documentary as Seven Up.
Do you, have you heard of Seven Up?
Micah: Tell me about it.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yeah, so it's, it's basically like this UK TV series that producers followed. A bunch of people in the UK and interviewed them from when they were like seven years old and then came back in when they were 14 years old, came back when they were 21 and they kept interviewing them in this kind of like lifelong social experiment to see how their lives played out.
You know, it's just a coincidence that the research center I'm at is seven years, but every year I'm interviewing a subset of the researchers and saying, Hey, what's life gonna be like in the year 2050? Tell me how it's gonna change based on your research and what you've found. I'm trying to document that idea of science being iterative and a researcher thinking they'll end up at an end goal or having a end goal in mind, but showing that science is not chronological.
You know, they might go. Ping ponging around and not even get to the final goal. I'm trying to humanize the researchers. I'm trying to kind of document their failures as well to show that failures are a part of science. They're actually kind of useful, so you don't keep going down the wrong path. But yeah, I guess again, it's a form of storytelling and I'm also trying to ask the researchers, what do you do in your spare time?
What do you do when. You've worked on an experiment for like a year and it fails. How does that feel and what do you do? What do you do to sort of relax and what's your favorite TV show of 2024? That was one of my interview questions this year,
Micah: and I suppose through all of this, remember that behind every data point, there's a person.
Rachael Vorwerk: Yep. Exactly. Yeah, and I, I think what's really important is also the career paths are just so diverse, and I think showcasing that to the next generation of prospective scientists is so important as well to show that it's not sort of a one track pathway that you go on. It can be sort of a number of ways to get into science.
Micah: Now you had a very clear moment in your education where sort of the light bulb went off and you were like, science communication. That's it for me. What type of person should be thinking about stepping into science communication as a career?
Rachael Vorwerk: Yeah, I think someone that is very curious and. Maybe inspired, I guess I would say I am a naturally curious person.
Someone who, you know, you gotta be pretty patient. Someone who likes telling stories and is excited to train and empower others. Someone that feels okay to step aside and help to lift up someone else. 'cause you're not necessarily gonna be in the spotlight yourself. So, yeah, I'd say all those skills I think, and traits
Chai: we've been speaking to science communication expert, Rachel Vour. So Micah, what are some of your key takeaways from this conversation?
Micah: Obviously, it seems like we can't fully understand the implications of science for our lives and the implications for our societies if we don't have science communicated in a way that we as non-scientists can understand.
So I was very much taken by Rachel's efforts to humanize science to remind us that it's actually people who are behind scientific research and sharing their stories as a way of building connection and trust and making science more relatable.
Chai: Yeah, I mean, anytime you're communicating in a public space, it's really important to avoid alienating or talking down to your audience.
Really making people feel unintelligent can make them shut down even quicker. And it can distract from creating meaningful dialogue.
Micah: Yeah, I think so much of it really is about building trust and building relationship and engagement. I think she talked a lot about how important it is to take science beyond the facts and figures and into the emotional realm through storytelling.
I. And I think the trust element is challenging too, because of course, science by its very nature is not static, right? So how do you build trust in a topic that is supposed to change, is supposed to evolve, is supposed to bring forward new information. I. And I think what Rachel had to say about science communication's role in all of this just goes to show how critical it is that how we talk about science is as important as the science itself.
Chai: Yeah, that's definitely true. Even during COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that public relations were shaped by the perceived credibility of the messengers. And communicating about fast moving and complex topics such as artificial intelligence or pandemics. It's really challenging and requires a certain adaptability and certainly a lot of clarity.
This has. Been balancing the future from METTLER TOLEDO.
Micah: What questions about science and technology would you like answered in a future episode?
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