How do you get students to invest time in reading and analyzing primary scientific literature? That was the question I was faced with as I entered the academy as an assistant professor. It is that same question that led to the establishment of Club Kaur, a podcast series discussing and demonstrating strategies to teach, learn, and communicate science. This podcast exists in large part due to the efforts of my students at UNC Asheville, who have been my partners in learning these last 3 years. They have inspired me, challenged me, and surprised me with their love of learning and willingness to take on the most complex assignments.

So, why was this the main question on my mind? Primarily because my own relationship with scientific literature has been rather fraught. As an undergrad, I encountered scientific articles in a handful of my upper level courses. However, my first true foray into scilit was during my senior year when I started work on my undergraduate research project. Truth be told, I had no idea what I was doing. Reading the articles was clearly important – how else was I going to understand what had already been accomplished on my particular research topic or draw my own conclusions about the presented data? At the same time, no one had ever taught me how to read this particular type of writing. I found that sitting down with a journal article created feelings of overwhelm, as I struggled with the conventions of scientific writing and endless jargon. Just knowing that I had to do the reading to support my project was not enough to stir my internal motivation. So, I pushed through as best I could, my imposter syndrome getting stronger in the process.

Cut to graduate school, where the stakes were higher, but explicit instruction on reading and translating scilit remained mostly absent. I had picked up enough tricks to be able to actually sit with the literature without immediately running off to do chores or more lab work just to avoid the task. But, I can’t say I ever enjoyed reading the papers. This was in large part because I found them inaccessible, like there was a secret code that could make it fun but I never found out what it was.

What I did enjoy was science podcasting – particularly, Radiolab. Episodes of Radiolab kept me company as a graduate student. I grew recombinant proteins, dissected primary neurons, perfused said proteins over the dissected neurons to watch changes in calcium signaling, and scored stacks of behavioral videos while listening to conversations between Jad, Robert, and their various guests. My favorite thing about Radiolab was their ability to tell scientific stories without losing the texture of the science. As a neurobiologist in training, many of their earlier episodes fell within my area of scientific interest. I found myself scrutinizing the scicomm within the episodes, and was always happy to see they’d done a great job yet again. By keeping the nuances of the topic at hand in mind, the creators of Radiolab were able to avoid one of the most common pitfalls of science communication – jumping from a scientific finding to a broad generalization that is not actually supported by the research being discussed. I unconsciously started to use their storytelling strategies in my own presentations, and saw their immediate effectiveness.

I had filed away this information somewhere in my head as I geared up to finish my PhD. It wasn’t until I started my tenure track position at UNC Asheville that I explicitly thought back to own experiences with scilit and scicomm through my education. What had been missing?