For Maryam Zaringhalam, Creativity Is The Key To Making Science More Accessible

Maryam Zaringhalam’s interest in biology started the way it does for most burgeoning biologists. There was a pig, a dissection, and a ninth-grade classroom.

“I had this moment where I was looking inside this pig and thinking, ‘Gosh, if I weren’t dissecting it, all of these little parts inside this pig would make it come together and be this oinking, rolling-around-in-the-mud creature," she tells Bustle.

Zaringham is a biologist and science writer who has made her career out of communicating scientific research and policies to the public through art, storytelling, and advocacy. She was a 2017 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow. It was during grad school at Rockefeller University that she decided to become a scientist who worked with the public, rather than a scientist who rarely leaves the ivory tower.

Since that decision, she’s founded ArtLab, a blog and event series that looks at scientific topics through the lens of art, and Science Soapbox, a podcast that seeks to inform people about how research can affect policy-making. She also serves on the board of 500 Women Scientists, an advocacy organization for women in STEM.

Choosing to work with the public — aka careers in fields such as journalism or consulting — versus climbing the academic ladder can be a tough decision for science PhDs. The hyper-specialization that a PhD requires (“I know a whole heck of a lot about this one very specific chemical tweak to an RNA letter,” she says) was, in part, what led Zaringhalam to connect her work with the communities who might benefit from it.

“In the space of biology and biomedical research, which is what my background was in,” she explains, “there’s a whole lot more connecting that needs to be done between the sorts of work we do in the lab and the application to a community that should be benefitting from that work.”

Looking at science through an outside, even artistic lens, started while she was an undergrad at New York University. Thanks to NYU’s renowned Tisch School of the Arts program, many of Zaringhalam’s friends were artists and filmmakers. She would listen to her friends discuss why they chose a certain camera angle or what the motivation was behind a piece of art.

“It gave me this language of creativity, and curiosity, and failure, which happens a lot in the arts as well as the sciences,” she says. “To be somebody who could talk more about the science I was interested in, the kinds of creative questions I was interested in pursuing. It also helped me tap into and reconnect with the purpose of the work that I was doing.”

Her post-grad time at Rockefeller furthered her desire to connect with the public about why something like precision medicine matters or why a process is done a certain way in biological research. While the scientific community might get hyped about a discovery, she stresses that discovery “without ethical or societal boundaries” is dangerous. Connecting research between experts and the communities they’re serving — and how they can best be served — is what she’s passionate about.

Zaringhalam is currently working on a personal project to change the perception that scientists are lone geniuses who have all the answers. In other words, she’s fascinated by failure.

“Especially if you’re someone who’s a woman or from an underrepresented background, or queer or trans, you’ve been told your whole life you can’t hack it in this field,” she says. “That first brush with failure can be really demoralizing if you don’t know that’s just part of how science works. I think that talking about failure can make science more equitable in the long term because people have realistic expectations of what they’re getting into.”

In Iran, nearly 70 percent of science and engineering students are women. Growing up in an Iranian-American family, Zaringhalam saw a lot of examples of women in science, like her mom who’s a medical doctor. It wasn’t until grad school that Zaringhalam saw “only eight or nine out of 72” faculty members who were women. She saw the hierarchical power structure of science, with often white men at the top who weren’t aware of the micro-aggressions or outright sexual and gender-based harassment that women face daily.

Valuing, paying, and rewarding scholars, particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color scholars, who “think a lot about and can consult on creating inclusive environments” is the first suggestion Zaringhalam has to change these discriminatory dynamics. “For that to be a priority, academic institutions and research organizations must listen to and reward experts, as well as listening to and valuing the experiences of faculty, students, and staff, who help them look inwards at the structures that exist and take concrete steps to make them truly work for everyone,” Zaringhalam says.

Zaringhalam would also like to see more bystander-intervention training that shows people who witness microaggressions how to intervene. Online communities like VanguardSTEM, a network that empowers women, girls, and non-binary people of color in STEM, and 500 Women Scientists, the organization Zaringhalam works with to make science more inclusive, are also helping with advocacy and creating ideas.

For Zaringhalam, this type of work is paramount in communicating policy and research in accessible ways. “It’s getting back to the spirit of creating knowledge,” Zaringhalam says. “That excitement that comes from talking about creativity rather than the nuts and bolts.”