Speak up Academia
Interview with with Dr. Mohit Kumar Jolly
Gist
The art of exchanging information and ideas is at the heart of any successful career and for effective communication one needs to be an active listener along with possessing efficient writing and clear speaking skills. In this Scikonnect podcast by Biopatrika, Dr. Mohit Kumar Jolly brings us his views and experience on effective science communication and his journey in academia as systems biologist. As a systems biologist he engages with academics from various different scientific disciplines and in order to have a clear understanding, he regularly relies on efficient science communication that erases boundaries among different scientific areas. Our hosts Prgya, Jaya and intern Parvathy engage with Dr. Jolly in an interesting conversation on the various aspects of science communication and its importance in day-to-day work of a scientist with peers and the public alike. Tune in, won’t you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZnp-HWpHv8
Transcript
Pragya:
Your very own online science communication platform brings science closer to you in so many ways. We commit to connect our audience with scientists all across the globe, communicating their journey and remarkable experiences. Science is all about discovering new things and adding knowledge to the existing one.
Parvathy:
But it’s equally important to share findings with people right?.
Jaya:
Right, it requires great skills to effectively communicate your research to the academic diaspora as well as to the common man.
Pragya:
Biopatrika brings all science enthusiasts out there to our podcast featuring what happens inside academia and effective base of science communication. My co-host Jaya Kumari and Fantabulous intern Parvathy Veankateshwaran has been given the opportunity to speak to Professor Mohit Kumar Jolly to give us a sneak peek into his academic journey and his thoughts on science communication.
Jaya:
Dr. Mohit Kumar jolly is notably a big name in the field of systems biology. He completed his bachelors and Masters from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and PhD in Bioengineering at Rice University, where he was investigating the prospects of hybrid epithelial mesenchymal phenotypes in cancer metastasis. Spearheaded in research, he then worked as a Guide Coast Consortium postdoctoral fellow jointly at Rice University and UTMB Anderson’s Cancer Center developing computational models investigating the tumor microenvironment. At present, he is disputed as an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Science.
Parvathy:
Besides thinking about systems biology approaches, cancer metastasis and therapeutic resistance, he is very passionate about effective science communication and outreach programs. This has driven him forward to actively pursue his interest by being an integral part of the Society on Policy Center at IASC.
Pragya:
Thank you Jaya and Parvathy for introducing our guest, but we want to hear from Jolly himself a little bit about his background. Mohit, would you like to share something about yourself? Probably things that we missed out.
Mohit:
Thanks so much Pragya, Jaya, Parvathy and the entire Biopatrika team for this fantastic opportunity to share some of my experiences. Yes, Biopatrika is a fantastic initiative which has been spearheading various of these important aspects, such as interviewing students who are behind the research papers. Many times PIs and advisors, of course, get the credit, but people doing work are students. I think that’s a very good initiative. In terms of my background, I got interested in integrating different fields of cell biology at IIT Kanpur during my days there. Through courses and interacting with faculty members in physics and maths departments, who were looking at different biological systems and that motivated me to look into certain diseases from this perspective.i was fortunate to have courses and expertise on campus around these different disciplines and various mentors along the way who were kind enough to help me see how to connect the dots between these aspects and which is what I try to do currently in my lab at IISC. So our lab has various undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows coming from very different disciplines. From electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, bioinformatics, cancer biology, they all brainstorm ideas with one another to get a better understanding of how cancer cells metastasize and how they develop resistance against drugs. Now, as a part of this process, being able to communicate one’s ideas very clearly to people coming from very different backgrounds is essential and that has been my focus of science communication in more recent, past 25 years or so that I’ve been trying to train graduate students, postdoctoral fellows or undergraduate students, anyone involved in scientific research to step out of their comfort zone and try to talk about their work in a language in terms that are still scientific in nature concepts. They are still trying to communicate the same concepts and to an intelligent audience. But that audience does not speak the same language. So if you would write a code in Python and use the compiler of R to run it, it won’t. And similarly, it’s the concept about languages or the category of different disciplines. SO if I utter the word differentiation, It means very different things to cell biologist and the mathematician. So when a cell biologist says differentiation and a mathematician creates a very different image of that word. So what I’ve been trying to emphasize to my students and others around is that the responsibility of the so called sender in the communication process to make sure that the so called listener gets as accurate information as close a mental image of the word being uttered as that of the sender itself and the so called sender. And I’ll come to why I’m using the word so called because communication is actually not one way street, so these don’t keep switching, but nonetheless, the so called sender should begin to take on the responsibility that communication happens effectively, or it did not. We often easily put the responsibility on the listener for various reasons and shut off our own responsibilities, which I think is not a very effective way of continuing any dialogue in a product.
Credits
Hosts: Pragya, Jaya, Parvathy
Editing: Samriti, Nikhil, Virender, Salma
Social: Charu Gupta, Albertha Joseph-Alexander Salma
Music by Aditya Sutar
