SAI-P: Exploring the Infrastructure Available to Scientists to Communicate Strategically

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Scientists face increasing demands to communicate with a diverse range of audiences. Communication professionals offer a robust infrastructure to help with this, but scientists often lack substantive access to this infrastructure. Scientists especially lack access to experts who can help them identify and prioritize concrete goals and then develop evidence-based paths to achieving those goals.

This SAI planning project begins to design and prioritize a set of integrated projects to support the communication needs of the scientific community. The project gains a better understanding of why scientists rarely use strategic communication guidance. It also begins to develop a path towards increasing scientists’ access to such infrastructure.

Improved use of a sophisticated communication infrastructure will support broad dissemination of scientific discoveries to stakeholders, policy makers, and society while also improving scientists’ capacity to integrate other society members’ insights and priorities into research choices.

This SAI planning project lays the foundation to help the scientific community make more evidence-based, strategy-minded communication choices to improve their contributions to society. Current science communication infrastructure may limit scientists’ ability to access strategic communication guidance for three reasons. These include limited demand for strategic advice, limited funding for strategic support, and limited access to strategy-minded people.

Interviews with scientists, practitioners, and science communication experts are used to prioritize where within this landscape to put additional research focus and design future, collaborative projects. By thinking of strategic communication as a form of scientific infrastructure, this SAI planning activity lays the foundation for enhanced and better utilized resources with which scientists can communicate in the context of their research to both disseminate their insights and learn from the insights of others.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.