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Sheeva Azma (00:00)
I think it would be cool for like, lawmakers to have a scientist to bounce ideas off of for like, communications, like, hey, what do you think of these communications? Is this right? The one problem that I see, and I think this is like a social problem, at least in the US, we're so incredibly politically divided. I don't know how much science has a role in making people less divided. I think there is a role for that. But
I think the only solution is to elect more scientists to office.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:24)
Welcome to Science Marketer podcast. Today on the show, I'm talking about politics and science communication with Sheeva Asma. Sheeva is a CEO of Fancy Comma and also author of the Science X Marketing book. Hi Sheeva, welcome to the show.
Sheeva Azma (00:41)
Thank you. It's great to be here chatting with you today.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:44)
So we'll start with a bit of background about yourself, so your career and how you've been connected to those two interesting and different worlds, so politics and science communication. So could you go back on your background and explain what you've been doing?
Sheeva Azma (01:00)
Yes, so I am currently the CEO of Fancy Comma LLC, which is a science communications and policy consulting firm. We also do marketing, which I consider to be science communications, sometimes policy, some policy consulting. So I actually did not receive any training to specifically do science communications and policy consulting. I did my bachelor's in brain and cognitive science at MIT. Then I worked at Mass General Hospital.
in Boston for three years and then I went to grad school at Georgetown, entered a PhD program, left with my masters. So then I had to come up with a new, basically a new career path for myself. So I started freelancing while I was applying to jobs. And then I realized I was writing all these explainer blogs explaining science because there were people that needed the science explained for like supplements or
different science things. So I started doing that. Then over time I got better and better clients and they started asking me to write copy and I was like, what's copy? So I Googled it and then I started learning all the marketing terms. So that's how I got into science marketing. And at the same time, was also, since I was in high school, I was working on political campaigns, even though I wasn't old enough to
And one summer in college, I was doing both neuroscience research and helping elect a senator, which we won the primary, but we lost the general election. so yeah, so then I after graduate school, I started freelance writing, then I decided I missed Washington, DC.
I moved back to DC and did an internship in Congress for two and a half months and then I came back and ever since then I've been kind of just pursuing everything I love in parallel. science communication slash marketing and policy and politics, I guess you could say.
Joachim Eeckhout (02:52)
That's really interesting. It's not the first thing we think about when we talk about science communication, but policy and politics in general is often also influenced by science. So yeah, that's really what I want to explore today with you. And maybe the first thing to understand is...
how you apply science communication to politics. Can you share a bit of some examples?
Sheeva Azma (03:20)
Yeah, so back in 2020, there was a guy running for Senate named Mark Kelly. He is a former astronaut, former Navy, US Navy pilot. And I was like, I have to help elect this person. It would be so great for science. Astronauts should never lose their political elections. So I signed up to volunteer for Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona.
He's like a, I would say he's a moderate Democrat, but I have also worked on libertarian and Republican campaigns. kind of, there's a lot of, I've worked on a lot of political campaigns over the years, but one thing that I did during that campaign, besides calling and canvassing Arizonans in both English and Spanish, was to help come up with like social media posts for their page and like content ideas and.
coming up with different ways to format the tweets, because back then Twitter was still Twitter, think. And one thing that Senator Mark Kelly does a lot on his social media is post about his naval experience, and post about STEM and how important it is to stuff that astronauts say, it's important to tackle your challenges and dream big and everything.
There was one tweet that he had about how his astronaut experience directly related to his congressional experience. And another thing he was doing at the time was he introduced, I think he was one of the main co-sponsors of the Chips and Science Act, which brought manufacturing of high-tech chips to the Arizona region.
I guess you could say it didn't directly involve communicating science, like my job working in politics, but the skills I gained working in politics, I could apply to science communication because working in Congress, I learned that everyone in Congress is obsessed with their self image to an extreme degree. And many people in the US have a negative view of their policymakers, possibly because of stuff like this, but,
The way you present yourself matters in Congress. And so I think that's something that is really valuable in science communication because we never think of.
how other people see us because as scientists, we are just scientists and like, who cares how other people see us in a way, because like, first of all, we're not famous. And secondly, we always think that our work is much more important than what people may think of it. But it turns out that politicians here, at least in the US, politicians fund science. So there've been a number of issues with
science funding becoming politicized and there's like numerous court cases happening right now. So I have the opinion that scientists could learn some marketing skills just by entering politics and being forced to interact with different people, people they probably have never talked to before. United pretty much only like my staff, the fellow people I worked with on political campaigns, very few of them were scientists. The only thing we had in common was our shared love of the political candidate and like
They were usually much more on the humanities side than me, but I think it's a valuable experience to get involved in politics just to learn these lessons about communication and also to help influence the political process.
Joachim Eeckhout (06:34)
This influence is also interesting. Have you been working, for instance, with life sciences companies who are trying to push new policies, so kind of lobbying? Is it also something you're familiar with?
Sheeva Azma (06:48)
Well, so I did work with many life sciences companies in the pandemic, like so many life sciences companies that I was able to buy a car. So I did apply my political experience like the this kind of idea where it's like you have to say something that's really clear.
you have to say it in a way that other people will get the message in a way that makes sense. it also fits the brand, but it's also scientific. that was, I think, skill. I had one client tell me that they hired me just because I had the science background and the skills that, like PR skills and marketing skills that marketers have. Because at that time, it seemed rare because my client was literally like,
hired me because of my unique skill set that I'd been a scientist and I'd worked in marketing. So yeah, I think that it's really important to when you be really strategic and in a strategic in a way that I never had really understood before I worked in Congress or before I got into the world where image is everything because optics is a thing in politics where if you say something that looks bad, no one's going to like your message.
you have to either transcend the optics with like a really solid message or kind of like couch your message so that it doesn't break the optics of the political situation, which is pretty tough. And I don't know that in the COVID pandemic, life sciences companies, especially vaccine companies were really able to communicate as much about their vaccines and build trust as much as was possible. Many of those things were not due to the message. I'm sure it was due to like,
bureaucratic nature of life sciences companies and their legal departments, but it would have been nice to have some hired a hire like a PR firm or something or like a politics consulting firm to ask people what are their thoughts on vaccines? What are their thoughts on these other therapeutics and see if they could kind of like develop a message that was informed by like polling, political polling, kind of like politicians do with their messages.
Joachim Eeckhout (08:51)
Are you still involved with politics in some ways now with your current clients?
Sheeva Azma (08:57)
it's a weird time politically in the US. I was the founder of Scientists for Harris, which is was a, it was a group of scientists, federal scientists, all kinds of scientists that were in the US that were supporting Kamala Harris for president and obviously Kamala Harris didn't win. I linked up with the official Biden Harris.
well, it was Biden Harris, then it became Harris-Waltz campaign. So was like an official sanctioned coalition of the Harris-Waltz campaign. And so we still have like a Twitter presence, but I actually did recently link up with Stand Up for Science and I planned a Stand Up for Science, I guess you could say,
rally on the Oklahoma City Capitol. And that was almost entirely thanks to my politics and marketing experience because I came up with a flyer. I called lawmakers kind of like I did when I worked for a Senate campaign and just called them and talked to them. And I was like, hey, do you want to come to this? Like, this is going to be great. And of course, from the PR angle, I tried to make it as good PR for the political people as possible. And amazingly, our event was picked up by
multiple local news sources. And we had 100 scientists basically like march out of their labs because here in Oklahoma City, there's a lot of like research labs right by the Capitol, which is kind of ironic because we had a lot of anti-mask and anti-vaccine protests in COVID. And it was, I felt like we never had any pro-science protests or anything. So scientists marched out of their lab, came to the Capitol. We heard speeches from lawmakers. I gave a really great speech.
I was a speaker at my high school graduation and I haven't given like a real speech since then. So was nice to get back into speech writing. So I used all of my skills and we stood up for science. I didn't get paid to do that event, it like the perfect combination of my skills and interests and background. I don't think that a non-scientist would have been able to get so many scientists to come to this rally.
Of course, the political times are such that you probably can get a lot of people to it. There's been many, many different rallies across the US about actually many different topics, but that's one thing I've been doing. Another, and that was a nonpartisan rally. It wasn't about like one, like political view over another was just give us back our science funding that, that, that that's being taken away from the NIH and NSF.
Another thing I've been doing is speaking to college and graduate students about science policy and how to get involved in science policy. Here in the US, our science is funded by the federal government. So our lawmakers have the power of the purse. So Congress. So how to call your Congress people without being mean. The people that answer the phones in our Congress are unpaid staffers like I used to be one. And wow, the people that are on the phones.
Sometimes you're like, I don't even know what this person is saying, but you have to take all of them because that's how our political process works. So how to navigate that process because we don't really, many scientists that I've talked to feel like politics is something that they're just not part of. And I think part of that reason is because people that have a politics background and a government background, they're the ones that
go into politics, but people with science backgrounds, it's harder for them to go into politics. A lot of internships and opportunities in Congress are open only to history and government and political science majors. So we have to make space for ourselves in this, not just in Congress, but also in the judicial branch. I don't think I've ever met a lawyer that, I mean, I know some lawyers that are MIT graduates like me, but it's pretty rare to have a lawyer that takes a lot of STEM classes. So we have to fit.
STEM into those branches. And the only way to do that, in my opinion, is for scientists to do that. And it's hard because many scientists don't have marketing skills. Like if you told me in grad school to write a marketing blog and do SEO and everything, I probably would have been like, what are you talking about? But now it's totally learnable. And I think that science-informed marketing
is honestly just better. One of my pet peeves is watching those commercials, those like drug commercials where it's like there's a puppy and they're like walking through a field and then it's like a commercial for like some MS drug or something or whatever drug it is and it's like lists the long list of side effects. Sometimes you don't even know what the drug is about.
And I know the objective of those commercials is not to inform you about this drug and how great it is, but just to get its name out there. But I think even when you look at the social media accounts of different biotech companies, if they explain how the drugs work instead of just saying, this drug is great, I would love to know more about the mechanism of action of different drugs on their social media page,
Feels like there's all these new neuro drugs coming out and I'm a neuroscientist by training and I'm like, I wonder what these even do, but I don't have the time to Google each of them. So I just have all these drug names in my mind and I have no idea what they do. And I'm like, are they even good? I mean, you can't tell from the marketing if they're good, but I really do wish that marketing was more infused with science.
Joachim Eeckhout (14:13)
Yeah, makes sense. I mean, here in Europe, we don't even have pharmaceuticals advertising. It's not allowed. So this removes a problem. But I can imagine, and I have seen all those spots as well online, just following a bit like what the pharma marketing is doing in the US. And yeah, most of the time it's really like just well-produced videos without really...
the meaning of the science. I agree with you, there is more education to be made. When you talk about science and when you communicate science or even market it and try to interest maybe a political audience, what are the challenges?
Sheeva Azma (14:57)
Well, what I've learned about advocating for science in this current time is that there people that really love science and they will support a candidate that supports science. But there are other people that science is not their number one issue. People have different values. That's not to say there are people that actively hate science in our country. Science has actually become a really divisive topic right now. One thing that has happened in the US is the
appointment of RFK Jr. to the HHS and he's notoriously anti-vax and one of the first and so this was like a whole drama and I watched it on C-SPAN. There was one Senator, he's a doctor so and he's Republican.
he was, he voted yes for, to confirm RFK Jr. he voted yes because he said that he talked to RFK Jr. and they, that RFK Jr. wasn't going to be making any changes to vaccines, how vaccines are approved, stuff like that. But then one of the first things RFK Jr. did when he took office was to actually
change all these vaccine recommendations. I emailed my lawmakers, I called my lawmakers, I have called them multiple times. And I was like, you know, this isn't a good choice. And they were grateful for my input, but they still confirmed this guy. So now in the US, we have this like disconnect between our politicians and the actual, I would say the actual scientific facts and scientific and medical expertise is kind of...
It's just not a part of policymaking right now, at least in health. it's very concerning and it makes a good point for like, scientists need to be involved in the process. But the question is, how can scientists get involved in this process that is increasingly politicized?
So I think that like the really hard part about communicating science and political communications is getting past this idea that scientists are always right and truly engaging with the discussion and.
answering people's questions. And I don't see any lawmakers doing that because they don't hire scientists or people that know science. I've definitely seen minor science errors in the tweets and posts from our lawmakers because I follow all of our lawmakers on Twitter. I just wish the conversation was a bit more precise because when you don't have scientific experts talking about the science, it kind of becomes more about
other parts of politics than it is about the actual science.
Joachim Eeckhout (17:21)
Yeah, so for you, it's scientists needs to be involved in this discussion to make it really like to make things change basically.
Sheeva Azma (17:32)
Yeah, like, so you could have like, I think it would be cool for like, lawmakers or anyone to have a scientist to bounce ideas off of for like, communications, like, hey, what do you think of these communications? Is this right? The one problem that I see, and I think this is like a social problem, at least in the US, we're so incredibly politically divided. I don't know how much science has a role in making people less divided. I think there is a role for that. But
There's so many different issues. no political candidate has all of my ideal pro-science issues like in their portfolio. So it's like, they're not scientists either. So some of them, it's like, I'm not sure. I think the only solution is to elect more scientists to office.
one thing I wanted to mention was that even though like it's important to not over politicize science, I think it's important for scientists to stay connected to their local communities, especially right now when there's so much stuff happening, especially for US scientists.
But probably for scientists everywhere that can do so, like that's where their government set up, that they're in a democracy and they can be participating in their government. I think it's important for scientists to be involved and engaged and maybe go out of their comfort zone and sign up to like go knock doors for a candidate. You gain a lot of like really important one-on-one like relational experience talking to people and you can...
use that experience in your marketing. Like when you imagine like who's actually going to you know read this marketing? Well it's probably going to be like someone like that person I talked to that didn't really have any science background but they are just a curious and interested person in the world and it's good to get out there and just connect with people and talk to people that aren't in science because like we politicians
They're always with themselves, with each other, and scientists are incredibly siloed. So I think scientists and politicians should have more conversations,
Joachim Eeckhout (19:31)
I think it's a great advice because it also helps maybe scientists get outside of their comfort zone and also confront maybe the science with the outside world. So it of also helps them actually communicate in general about their science. So even for anyone who's thinking about potentially leaving academia to start something else, could be marketing, communication, whatever.
It's maybe also a good path to take and start gaining some experience there.
Sheeva Azma (20:04)
Yeah, and I would add that actually you can learn a lot about strategy from working on political campaigns because the communications market, a political campaign is in fact a campaign that has strategy. I've learned a lot about different strategies. There's some political campaigns where their whole strategy is tear down the other candidate. That works, I guess, like, and I have like thoughts on all this, but then there's other political campaigns where the person's really well known and the only thing is you just have to like get out there and knock doors and stuff and
That's another different strategy. And there's also communications involved. There's a lot of like science issues happening with like climate and health and defense has a lot of science and technology, agriculture, child health has a lot of like neuroscience and stuff behind it.
you just like kind of develop this like strategic mind from politics that you really don't get in science in the same way.
Joachim Eeckhout (20:59)
So thanks Sheeva for sharing your insights. I think it's been really interesting conversation. Not something I'm used to discuss usually, but I think I learned a lot. So that was great. Thanks a lot.
Sheeva Azma (21:11)
Yep, thank you for chatting with me today. I really enjoyed this.
Joachim Eeckhout (21:14)
So if you want to learn more about science communication and marketing, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. And you can also follow my newsletter at thesciencemarketer.com. See you soon for a new episode.