from left: Jeff, Nic, Victor, and Caroline
from right: Nate, Mack, Melissa, and Julia
Jason and Jo
Building on the philosophical approach we took to recent work in the social science of science communication last year, we will begin to pursue some empirical work of our own this year with the help of our new postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Jo Huxster, and an expanded team of student research assistants. We bade a fond farewell to Rachel Greenburg (class of 2015) and lost rising sophomore Erin Schwab to a project in Engineering more closely tuned to her career ambitions, but were lucky enough to pick up three new students: first-year Presidential Fellow Nate Aspinal (undeclared), junior Mack Jones (a Classics and Biology double-major), and Melissa Hopkins (a Philosophy and Psychology double-major). They join our five returning researchers, bringing the PoPUS crew up to an auspicious eleven (“one louder”, you know).
To start the term, we will be dividing our work between several distinct sub-projects under the public understanding of science umbrella, managed by Jo but spearheaded by student teams. The proximate goal will be to design some experiments that put our theoretical framework concerning the epistemic resilience of understanding over knowledge to the test and begin collecting pilot data in order to apply for further grant support. We will be updating this blog in the coming months with news of our progress.
