As an atmospheric chemist, I am to keep the general public informed about issues of climate change and air quality. Tailoring this communication to those without a scientific background can be challenging, but it is crucial in making research of any kind meaningful and valuable. I have come up with three strategies that I think are helpful when learning to communicate research.

1. Researching your audience. Just like with resumes and job applications it can be absolutely crucial to plan ahead and find out who you are going to be talking to so that you can appeal to them. If you start by figuring out what the educational background is of the person you are trying to communicate your finding to you can easily jump to an appropriate level of detail to include.

2. Asking questions. In the situation where you are engaging in a conversation with someone who wants to hear about your research you can ask them questions about their background in your subject matter and even have them tell you what they know in order to guide your presentation of your research. 

3. Planning for levels. If you aren’t able to find out a bit about your audience ahead of time and it’s not the right environment to ask your audience questions this is my opinion on the best approach. Start by coming up with a couple of possible levels that your audience could be at. For example, when I am thinking about presenting my own research I can identify four types of audiences that I may be addressing: someone who has never taken a chemistry course, anyone who’s taken a chemistry class, a scientist of any discipline, an atmospheric chemist. While labels are not always helpful, I like to use these as a guide for how to begin communicating my research

There are several different types of people that I need to be able to communicate my research to in order for it to have the broadest possible impact that it can have. Firstly, I will need to learn how to communicate my research to policymakers so that they can be guided to make informed decisions about regulations placed on trace gas emissions. I will also need to be able to communicate with computer scientists throughout my project. Modeling is a crucial part of this experiment and at a certain point my research becomes impossible without a deeper understanding of algorithms, machine learning, and computational modeling, all of which I can learn from those with a computer science background. Lastly, among the field of atmospheric chemistry, scientists can come from a variety of backgrounds. Many are well versed in environmental science but perhaps are not as instrumentally savvy as those with a more rigorous chemistry background. And on the contrary I come from a chemistry background and have not been as exposed to many of the common principles of environmental science that happen outside the atmosphere. All of these types of people can learn a lot from my research and I can learn a lot from them so it is important to practice communication skills across disciplines to expand to scope of exciting new research.