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This post was contributed by guest blogger Chinmaya Sadangi, a postdoc at the University of Toronto.

The Addictive Brain was founded in early 2018 with the goal of communicating science to non-scientists. Chinmaya Sadangi, a postdoc at the University of Toronto, created The Addictive Brain to spread awareness about how scientists utilize tax-payer money and government funding for research, and also to encourage women, students, and underrepresented minorities to study STEM subjects.

Here, Sadangi and his team answer a few questions about The Addictive Brain and science communication for general audiences.

When Jessica Sacher, a microbiologist from the University of Alberta, saw that scientists were using Twitter to find phages to treat an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection, she shared that tweet with Jan Zheng, a UX designer that she knew. “We had actually met at a lindy hop swing dance event,” Zheng says (networking can happen anywhere!). The pair quickly teamed up to create Phage Directory in a whirlwind three days in November 2017.

Before I started writing for the Addgene blog, sharing Chemistry Cat memes was how I used social media as a scientist. I mean, I had a LinkedIn page and a Twitter handle, but I wasn’t using them to my professional advantage. It wasn’t until I wrote a blog post about a research paper that explored how scientists connect on Twitter that I realized 1) a lot of scientists are using social media professionally, and 2) I needed to start using Twitter.

This guest post was contributed by Johnny Kung, Director of New Initiatives for the Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd).

Advances in genetic technologies and other biomedical innovations promise an improved understanding of how our bodies work, new treatments for debilitating diseases, and maybe even ways to alleviate health disparities. But as the science moves forward at a blistering pace, it is becoming ever more urgent for scientists to engage broadly with diverse communities, to raise awareness about where science is and where it is going, and to thoughtfully address the hopes and concerns of these communities. This kind of engagement and two-way dialogue is crucial if we as a society are to figure out the best way to shepherd technologies through thorny ethical issues, ensure that everyone will have the possibility of benefiting from the fruits of scientific research, and prevent technological advances from exacerbating existing inequalities and injustices.

When you think about going to a scientific conference, you may think about sitting amongst a sea of chairs listening to talks all day. But nope, not at the American Society for Microbiology 2018 Microbe meeting. Soon after I arrived, I was looking through a paper-based, affordable, and portable microscope called the ‘foldscope’ (Dr. Prakash, Stanford University). Right there on the floor outside the lecture hall.