Author Jorge Cham Simplifies Science in an Entertaining Way

Cham's work spans the range of preschoolers to adults.

In the afternoon, he led an interactive science communication workshop at UC Merced geared toward graduate students and researchers. He explained the need to boil down their research into simpler terms to communicate with others not in their fields of study.

Marie Buhl, an international student from Germany and third-year Ph.D. candidate in environmental systems, found the training enlightening.

"I often have trouble explaining my research, especially when needing to translate to my parents and siblings. Sometimes I do not even know the German equivalent for some research jargon I am using in English," Buhl said. "The workshop really opened my eyes to how important good science communication is."

Cham assigned an exercise, asking each student to write a paragraph about their research. Then they broke into pairs and tried to explain it to one another using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language with the help of a text editing app.

Buhl partnered with a friend who had recently tried to explain his research to her, but she couldn't grasp it.

"During the exercise, I had a little lightbulb moment (with the help of some food analogies)," she said. "If you are mindful, a short and simple explanation really is not difficult. But my biggest takeaway is that while I want to communicate in easy-to-understand ways, I also want to convince my audience that what I am doing is still complex, novel and difficult. It is all about the balance."