What COVID taught one epidemiologist about speaking to build trust, without jargon

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges.

Today's leader, Prativa Baral she's an epidemiologist who founded a special organization to help scientists better communicate with the public. The lessons learned she shares can help anyone get their message heard.

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I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet the Leader.

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: If you do the work but no one notices, does it matter? It absolutely does matter. But if you are able to communicate it and so more people can get inspired from your ideas, more people can get inspired from your research, come up with new questions, then we're one step closer to solving some of the challenges, some of the many challenges that we're facing today.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Scientists work on the front line tackling some of the world's most pressing problems. But thanks to jargon and technical talk, most people won't understand them, the importance of their work. or how they can help scale solutions.

Prativa Baral knows this well. She's an epidemiologist and PhD candidate at John Hopkins.

She's also a global health professional who is looking to help the world get more prepared for the next global health emergency.

She has worked in a number of capacities with global organizations like the UN, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But in her work, one clear need has stood out: the need for clear jargon-free communication.

COVID drove home the life-or-death consequences of science talk that people don't understand or trust. And as new pandemics and technological shifts are around the corner, it will be even more important for academics, scientists and technologists to help people make sense of the changing world around them.

To this end, she co-founded a special social enterprise: Let Science Connect. This initiative uses coaching and workshops in science communications to train experts and bridge the understanding gaps between them and the rest of the world.

Their takeaways don't just make science more accessible and useful. They can help any leader in any sector speak more simply, more clearly, and better connect their message with the people they most want to reach.

We will get into all of that, but first we'll get back to basics and she'll share with me her definition of health.

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Ooh, that is the million-dollar question. And I think most people, when they think about health, they think about hospitals, they think about health systems, they think about taking a biomedical lens to what it means to be healthy. And what I want people to know, and a lot of my work is on taking that level of health and elevating it.

Because health is not just about your physical body, it's about where you live, what you do, where you work at your surroundings, your environment impacts you, your social capital, your social circumstances impact your health. And I think at this point, especially three years into the pandemic, we've seen that there are these upstream variables like inequality, like these determinants that are harder to measure, but that are so important and that impact our health.

We've seen that with COVID, people with lower socioeconomic status had much, much more challenging circumstances in dealing with COVID than people who had the resources to be able to protect themselves, to have PPE, to have all of that.

So, to me, health is more than just about physical health. It's about your mental health, it's about your social health. It's about health and your wellbeing, are you able to thrive in this world beyond just survive.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And you have an initiative with the university that sort of looks at tracking these sorts of, you know, not often measurable things. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: What we're trying to do is recognize that a lot of the health emergencies that we are dealing with and that we will be dealing with in the future, whether it's climate or other pandemics or other infectious diseases, are exacerbated by these other circumstances beyond your health. So, what I mean by that is your social, your technological, your economic, your environmental, and the political factors all play a role in whether a health emergency will become a health emergency or can be dealt with well before it becomes this large global scale issue.

And so that's what we're trying to put our emphasis on and focus on is really to say, "Hey, if we want to prepare for the next health emergencies, it's not enough for us to say let's strengthen our health systems." That is very, very vital. But beyond that, we need to be looking at these bigger factors and seeing that connection between these bigger factors and health emergencies.

So again, what I mentioned about inequality, about public trust in government, public trust in science, all of these things, you know, economic inequalities, all of these things play a role in our health. And so that's what we're trying to do is to see how can we monitor it, how can we measure it, and how can we take that measurement and say, "oh, we need to be able to deal with this issue because we're not prepared for the next pandemic or emergency or what have you."

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And some of these less measurable variables -- just to kind of level set with people -- what are those?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: A lot of the times what we're dealing with is things like climate change or inequality or trust. These are things that are really hard to quantify. So, what we try to do is to find proxies. So equivalent things, equivalent ways of trying to measure these things.

They're not perfect, but we need to start somewhere, and that's what we're, my team, is trying to do, is to say, okay, if we were to measure trust, How would we go about doing it? Are there proxies that exist that we can use that will, in some ways give us some equivalence of what it is that's happening in the population?

And so, it's really, really challenging work because it's different from, let's say, measuring a temperature, right? You know exactly degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. Whereas when we're talking about these social factors, it's nuanced. There's context involved, and everything is so interdependent. And so, trying to take apart these little or big variables, I should say, and actually measure and monitor them is a really difficult challenge, but it's an important one that we need to understand.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how do you measure something like trust?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: So, a lot of the times trust is measured through surveys, and we try to be as representative as possible to get the feedback of the people that we want to understand. But it's, with surveys, it's an important tool, but of course there are biases.

And so, it's not just about looking at the quantitative measure with. With things like trust you want to contextualize that with qualitative data as well. And with qualitative data -- that's when you talk to people to try to understand why they are feeling the way they are feeling -- it's harder to get that level of understanding at a global scale because it's so much work, right?

You're asking people qualitatively. You're having conversations. You're meeting with communities versus if we were to measure something like a temperature, it's quantitative. You can get in, get out, and you can get a lot more data out of it. So, the work that we're doing, it's more mixed methods, I would say, because you're trying to capture both the quantitative side, but also the qualitative side.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And what are these other mixed method, other methods that you guys are using?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Our role at the university is less about the doing the data collection, more about developing a framework that will allow other people and big organizations to do this.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Also, you have an initiative that provides training and workshops for academics and researchers. Tell me a little bit about this training.

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: So, I'm super passionate about this and that's because as academics, as researchers, we're not incentivized to speak to other people. And what I mean by that is that when we publish, it's often to our bubble. It's people that are other experts in our field. When we go to conferences, we speak to other people in our field.

And so, all of a sudden, we had the pandemic. And all of a sudden, we were put in the limelight because people wanted to know what was going on. The science was changing, the scientific process was highlighted, and academics had to go in front and try to explain that.

But the issue is we've never had any training in it because we were never incentivized to get that training. And so, what I realized is that growing up I did a lot of public speaking. I did a lot of working in other spaces beyond academia. And what I realized is communications is one of the most important tools and training skills that we need to have as academics.

And so, what I started was to develop these workshops with academics and researchers and to show them that it's so important to speak to the public and they're doing it already, but the issue is how do we do it in a way that the public can understand?

And as I said with COVID, what happened was, most people, when they think of the science, they think of the final output. But all of a sudden with COVID, things were changing so quickly. The science was changing, the evidence was changing. And so, to be able to communicate that uncertainty and that changing science became even more important.

And that's why I started this because I firmly believe that scientists are doing such incredible work and if we're able to share that to the public, to the audience, to various audiences, to the private sector, to governments, whoever it is that you're speaking with, if you're able to effectively communicate your science, then the world is your oyster, right?

You can do so much because then you can forge connections between other scientific teams that might be doing similar work. You can, because a lot of the challenges that we're facing are very interconnected. So, at Davos I went to a lot of panels on the intersection of climate and health. And so, we need not just academics to be able to speak to a general public, we also need them to be able to speak to each other, experts in other fields.

So that the solutions that we research on or hypothesize on can have all of these different lenses. And to be able to do that, we need to communicate effectively.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And what comprises this training?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: So, we have a couple of different lenses that we take. One is a one-on-one session. So, for instance, if academics have a pitch that they need to do to the private sector, for example, or a grant that they're writing or media, because a lot of us have been thrown into the media the last couple of years. How do you do that? And part of it is verbal, part of it is non-verbal. And so doing all of those one-on-one sessions, a little bit like coaching, depending on our clients' needs.

And then the other piece is workshops. And this part is really, really, Interesting and exciting, and that's because we make them very, very interactive, right? So, it's not an academic exercise. We don't go in front and say, this is how you communicate here are the slides. What we really try to do is to make them communicate to us during those workshops.

So, for instance, one exercise that we do is we'll provide a very technical paper of that person's field or that group's field. And we'll say, okay, explain this to me as if you were speaking to your niece. Explain it to me as if you were speaking to your grandmother, as if you were speaking to a 15-year-old, you know high schooler.

And the idea is to make them see that connection between themselves and someone in their family, for instance, so that they can see, "Okay, I don't have to go into all of this technical jargon."

At the end of the day, the framework that we want our researchers to use when they're speaking to a non-technical audience is: what is it? Why is it important and why should we care about it? And that's it. It's simple. It's just going layers and layers above to get that big picture so that people can understand, okay, I see why this is important and I see the value in your work, and I want to know more. So that's one of the exercises that we do.

But we have a bunch of different workshops that we really try to make as interactive as possible. One other piece that we work on is also the confidence piece, right? So, we've seen with the COVID pandemic as well, that sometimes there's a lot of misinformation that's circulated because the person that's speaking in front of the camera says it with such confidence, even if the data or the evidence doesn't back it up.

Part of the challenge and the potential for academics and researchers is not just to communicate their work in a way that that shows the value of their work, but also to do it with confidence so that people can understand the value as well. And so, when I meant the non-verbal and the verbal piece, I think both aspects of that are super important.

And so that's what we're doing. We're training academics and researchers and we're really, really excited to scale it up. Right now, we're mostly focused in Canada. But what we would like to do in the long term is to standardize this process, and as I said, I'm part of the Global Shapers community and leverage that community to see if this can be something that can be done internationally.

Because this is not a Western North American European problem. It's a problem that exists worldwide. And so being able to share this communication approach that's very specific to science as opposed to general communications is something that I would love to see scaled up everywhere around the world.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how many people have you helped so far?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: It's so many. We, we haven't started counting. So essentially what I started at as was as an instructor at Hopkins. So, I started teaching this class as part of the teaching team. So, it's hundreds of mostly PhD students and Dr/PhD students. And then this year we said, okay, we have to move beyond just our individual university.

So, it's myself and my business partner who are working on this, and now we've started expanding it to all other universities. The potential for the number of academics that will be trained under us is so huge and I'm excited to get started.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: At this point do you think it's in the hundreds or the thousands?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: I would say probably in the thousands.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: For people listening, you know, there's a lot of people that are experts that are listening to this. If they were going to look at their own writing are their sort of very, very common things that are usually, usually things that people can look at if they're going to try to simplify or sort of de-jargonify their work? What question should they ask themselves?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Yes. So, this was advice that someone gave me that I value still to this day. And it's, you don't want to sound like you're the smartest person in the room. That is not the goal of communications. What you're trying to do is to forge that connection with your audience and share your knowledge and your values so that they can understand a part of the world in a much better light.

And I think at the end of the day, the big picture is that. I think academics are trained to use jargon because it's a very technical field. And like I said, we're incentivized to use that type of language. So, when we write. We use a lot of jargon. We want to be as specific as possible because we're excited about our work, and we want to share all the specifics of our work.

But I think when you're speaking to a non-technical audience, it's really important to kind of take-off that cape and say, okay, my goal here is not to sound as if I'm presenting to my dean or to my, you know, academic friend. It's really to make it simple and make it clear. And so, going back to the framework, what is it? Why is it important? And what is it that you are working on? And just keeping it straight and clean and remove some of the jargon.

And like I said, you're not trying to sound like you're the smartest person in a room. You're not in a conference. You're really trying to get your work across and make people understand what you're working on.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How important is maybe asking people to sort of say, Hey, What's the before and after like, so that they can really identify what the change is?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Well, it's so important because like I said, in this world or in a lot of the transnational challenges that we're facing, academics are more and more needing to come out of our academic bubble. We need to work with private you know, public-private partnerships is something that we discuss, discussed a lot this week.

So, we need to be working with a lot of different stakeholders if we want to come up with appropriate solutions that will actually help us with some of these challenges that we're dealing with.

And so, I think it's so important to just be able to -- you know, one thing that we do in our training is the 60-second pitch. So how much can you fit into a 60-second pitch of your research of your work? And that's kind of, that goes to your 'before and after' question. Are you able to succinctly and precisely and in a way that showcases your work without using all the jargon in 60 seconds? And if you can, then I think you've solved a big challenge that we as academics are facing is you're able to speak to a number of stakeholders and tweak it based on your audience and say, okay, I made them understand why my work is important. How can we collaborate and how can we do something about whatever it is that we're currently working on?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there also a value in them sort of borrowing from other professions? I'm trained to be a journalist. And one of the things that we would always be drilled into is, can you tell the story in six words? Which usually means that one of those words is a verb, usually probably the second word. The first one is a noun. 'So and so did such and such'. So at the end of that is the impact. So is it something you would also recommend? Be like, Hey, you can borrow. It's okay.

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Absolutely. And in fact, this is what we use. It's a storytelling method, right? So, what we've noticed, and there's tons of studies on this, is that if you want to get your points across, showing data and evidence is not really going to do as much impact as you would want it to.

Especially if you're talking to people who have fixed values, especially nowadays with science being so politicized, throwing data and big numbers at people is not going to do what you want to do, which is to get them to understand why you're working on what you're working. And so, what we often use in the workshops is the storytelling method.

And that's exactly like you said. You have the antagonist, you have the protagonist, and then you have the impact piece. So, putting it in into that framework really helps because at the end of the day, science is about, it's a story, right? It's about how do we understand the world in a better way? And if you can think about.communications through that lens and specifically scientific communications through that lens, I think it makes it so much clearer because you're just explaining a story to a person, to an audience, and you're tweaking that story depending on what that audience needs from you. So, the storytelling technique is something that we've borrowed from journalism, and we use it all the time.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there anything you've been exposed to in the science communication that surprised you?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: I think something that I've been surprised with is using marketing techniques, you know, everything in academia is so siloed, and I think exactly like you said, being able to borrow some of these methods from other spaces that have used these techniques for decades since the very beginning is something that I'm learning more and more how to incorporate into these trainings.

At the end of the day, science communications is a form of marketing. You're trying to get a point across. You're trying to show the value of your work. And so that, I would say, was a connection that I hadn't initially made, even though now it's like, duh, of course it's obvious. So yes, I think that that would be it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Well, and I think it's an interesting point too, because a lot of academics, their audiences, most often going to be people reading academic journals and things like that --

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Exactly.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: -- And you can do a very nuanced headline with a couple words.

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Yes. Yes.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: But if you're going to be talking to the public in a mass way. Chances are the social or digital elements. So, you need to think like a marketer. It's okay to steal. From steal from marketing, and it's not cheating to go make a very clear sentence that says 'this and that and the other thing."

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: That's right. And one thing that I like I said, I did a lot of media because of COVID the last couple of years. And one thing that I learned on the job is to show that -- exactly like you said -- the clips that the producers use sometimes are very, very short. Right? The news cycle, you know, they're not going to put your full 30-minute interview, they're going to take a segment of what you're saying.

And so, it's kind of taught me to also be very precise with my work and precise with the way that I speak because one sentence or one segment of what I said might be used. And so, putting that into context and saying, okay. I can't go into technical details about the virus or about our immune system. All I can say is, why is this important? Why does this matter to the public? And what is it the, the central piece of what they need to know?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Why, personally, did you think that this initiative people need this training?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: I've seen so many incredible scientists who've done such great work, and then go in front of the public and try to explain the specific details of their work. And you notice that the public kind of doesn't necessarily want to get the specifics. They want to know how is this going to affect me? Am I in danger? Is my family in danger? How do I protect my community with respect to COVID?

And I think that was just an aha moment for me because, Again, I'm a PhD candidate at Hopkins, and part of my training at all of my academic institutions, we've never, it's never been a focus. Communications has never been a focus, but I think more so now more than ever seeing how important it is for us to collaborate with other fields, with other spaces.

We need to know how to communicate. If you do the work but no one notices, does it matter? It absolutely does matter, but if you are able to communicate it and so more people can get inspired from your ideas, more people can get inspired from your research, come up with new questions, then we're one step closer to solving some of the challenges, some of the many challenges that we're facing today.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there a book you recommend?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: Yes. My favourite book that I've read right before coming to Davos actually was Invisible Women, and it completely changed the way that I saw data, the way that I saw design, how we design our communities, how we design our buildings, how we design our spaces. And it's had a really profound impact on the way that I view my space and my work.

Because yes, so I would recommend everybody to read it, particularly men, because I think it's important for us to understand how data biases so many data biases exist in the way that our world has been constructed.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how would that change someone?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: It changes everything, right? When we're thinking about, for example, clinical trials, when we're thinking about medicine, when we're thinking about where is it that we're testing these really important interventions, and if the majority of the data comes from a particular demographic, and usually it's men and usually it's white men.

What does it mean for the rest of us who do not have that weight or that height or those demographics. And so that would change everything. If you read the book, you know, there's the, everything from, you know, snowplowing schedules to park spaces and the how they've been designed.

All of that is biased by data. And so, if the data that we're feeding into it is very, particular, and only requires the input from a particular demographic, then that means the rest of us are not represented and the rest of us are less safe. Everything from seat belts to medicine to clinical trials, it impacts the way that we live. It impacts the way that our health is affected, and it impacts everything, right?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What should leaders prioritize for the year ahead?

Prativa Baral, Let Science Connect: I can talk about that for hours. I think, again, I'm an epidemiologist and so what I would say is you cannot have a healthy economy. You cannot have a productive workforce, which is a lot of the discussions that we've had this year this week in Davos without a healthy population. And so, I would urge all leaders to look at health from a holistic lens, not just from a biomedical lens and say that we need to be paying attention to these social factors. We need to be paying attention to the environmental factors because as much as you want a thriving economy, you cannot have that if you don't have a healthy population.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That was Prativa Baral. Thanks to her and thanks so much to you for listening. A transcript of this episode and my colleagues' episodes, Radio Davos and the Book Club Podcast is available at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was presented and produced by me with Juan Toran as studio engineer, Taz Kelleher as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.