Audio Transcript

[00:00:00]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:16]
Ben Newsome: Welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. I’m glad to have you for another chat around science and STEM and all that sort of thing. This week we’re talking about science communication itself; what makes it work and what makes it not work so well. No matter where you are, if you’re an educator in any sort of formal or informal institution, or a researcher, talking about science is so important. Importantly, the audience has to understand what it is you’re talking about.

[00:00:42]
Ben Newsome: Dr James O’Hanlon very much has a lot of experience about this. He’s the founder and director of InSitu Science, which is a registered charity dedicated to science outreach and community engagement. You just might have heard James before through the InSitu Science podcast, where he hangs out with a lot of researchers and not only hears about their research, but also what is driving them to do the research in the first place—their passions, their interests, and the stories that make the science behind the scenes.

[00:01:09]
Ben Newsome: James, by the way, is a researcher, so we do get to hear about his work in insects and spiders, which is fascinating, especially if you love your ecology. But we do talk about science communication, and it will help you no matter how you’re trying to do it. So let’s get right into it.

[00:01:26]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re all about science, ed tech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S and click 100 free experiments.

[00:01:43]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:47]
Ben Newsome: Mate, I’m very happy to have a chat with you because you’ve been getting up to a lot of things over the last few years. I’m trying to work out which hat you wear.

[00:01:52]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Currently, I can’t even answer that question. Currently, it feels like I have multiple personalities floating around there, and you have to bring one forward at a moment’s notice and then put it away again and bring up the other one to deal with everything else.

[00:02:09]
Ben Newsome: Sounds like a true science communicator.

[00:02:13]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Especially now in the era that we’re living in, work life and home life has just been melded together again and you have to find yourself putting on your domestic hat amongst everything else. It’s good fun.

[00:02:27]
Ben Newsome: It is, actually. Mind you though, I think everyone has actually handled it

quite well, in amongst trying to sort all the tech stuff. But once all the tech stuff was sorted, you kind of go, okay, the purple block means I’m talking to this person and the green block means I’m visiting this person and the yellow block means I’m talking etc. You can kind of fit them amongst, you can do a lot from your home.

[00:02:47]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Yeah, particularly being scientists and science communicators, the stuff we do, we can do from home. And the stuff we do is very, very self-

motivated. We organise our own schedules and our own priorities pretty well. I think mostly what’s been keeping lots of us in the office is probably just guilt and looking like you’re showing up and looking like you’re doing your job to the people around you. Hopefully this period in time has changed things up quite a bit where

organisations, universities, museums, all that stuff will be more open to people working from home and being more trusting of people working out of the office.

[00:03:30]
Ben Newsome: Actually, there’s a lot of, and it’s not just ad hoc research, there’s been a fair bit of research around this sort of thing and the

people that can be actually more productive off-site because there’s less interruptions. It all depends, it’s not for everyone, but it certainly works the case. So, in case you’re listening and going, hang on, are we talking about working from home or whatnot? No, this is still a science podcast still. We’re definitely going to get into that. It was just curious because it is an interesting world this year, but it will change and keep on going as we go along.

[00:04:02]
Ben Newsome: Anyway, so James, I know you do wear a lot of hats, but what are some of the hats that you wear so people sort of get an idea about that?

[00:04:12]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I guess the hat that

most people might be familiar with is my researcher hat. So I study **animal behaviour**. I work on things like **insects** and **spiders**. In the past, I’ve worked on things like how **ants** disperse tree seeds—how they pick up tree seeds, bring them underground, essentially planting forests for us. I’ve worked on, let me think, **colour-changing grasshoppers** that live up in the Snowy Mountains.

[00:04:37]
Ben Newsome: Oh, they’re cool! I did them in my third year of uni. They’re really cool.

[00:04:43]
Dr James O’Hanlon: What else have I done? I’ve got all sorts of things. I guess my main projects in the past have been around cool looking **praying mantises**. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a creature called the **orchid mantis**, Ben.

[00:04:57]
Ben Newsome: Oh, they’re cool! You should video it. I was actually thinking, my wife works with a bloke who—it escapes me now the name of this spider, I hate this—but this tiny little cute little colourful spider that went crazy viral around the world because it does cool little dances.

[00:05:21]
Dr James O’Hanlon: **Peacock spiders**. You’re talking my language here.

[00:05:25]
Ben Newsome: Yes, so cool. She knows the bloke that actually did those YouTube videos.

[00:05:33]
Dr James O’Hanlon: It’s funny, I was actually just talking about **peacock spiders** with someone else the other day. Yeah, they did go completely viral a little while ago. I feel like this is the best public relations story that spiders have had in a long time. Now, whenever people think about spiders, they don’t think about huntsmen under their bed necessarily, their brains often go to these little **peacock spiders** that they have seen on a documentary or seen on YouTube and things.

[00:06:21]
Dr James O’Hanlon: As a big spider fan, I’m hoping that this is going to be a turning point for spiders. I was talking with someone who was kind of saying, nobody really cared about whales and saving the whales until somebody recorded whale song and it was this beautiful story about how whales sing to each other, and it just heightened the beauty and the allure of these animals. Hopefully, **peacock spiders** are going to do the same thing for spiders. Spiders are not going to be Halloween decorations anymore; they’re going to be everybody’s favourite household companion, who knows?

[00:06:45]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, anything that gets rid of mosquitoes is good in my book. But I feel kind of bad because there are people who do a lot of research in mosquitoes as well. There’s all sorts of interesting stuff.

[00:06:56]
Ben Newsome: For me, it is very much the case—**keystone species** are a thing. Sometimes it is the colourful, pretty, cuddly, furry little creature that actually saves a wider ecosystem. It’s a good thing.

[00:07:11]
Dr James O’Hanlon: This is kind of tying in with the kind of research I do. It’s why I sort of have to follow up my statement of, “I study **animal behaviour**,” with an explanation of all the different animals that I work on. Because you say something like that and people go, “Oh, kangaroos, dogs, cats, you must work on parrots,” something like that. People forget that **insects** and **spiders** are animals, and very important animals, and just as interesting and charismatic as koalas or pandas or things like that. We just need to tell these stories and get them out there.

[00:07:44]
Ben Newsome: What’s kind of neat about that is sometimes they’re incredibly complex. I mean, the classic version is the bees’ waggle dance—that whole idea that they really, really can describe quite clearly where something is from a food source. It’s brilliant and it’s really quite cool that people notice this.

[00:08:03]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Yeah, and not to be a naysayer again, but **bees** are another one of those groups. People talk about **bees** and how important **bees** are and “save the bees” and that kind of stuff, but they always just point to **honeybees**, which in Australia are not a native species. We’ve got all these native, cooler, much more interesting **native bees** doing the majority of the pollinating and **ecosystem services** and have all sorts of things going on about them.

[00:08:39]
Dr James O’Hanlon: But again, their stories aren’t being told. So it’s probably no surprise then that a person like me, with these sorts of attitudes, starts research and then goes, “Actually, I should get into science communication as well.”

[00:08:55]
Ben Newsome: Totally so. I mean, that’s definitely what I want to talk about. And just while you mention about the **native bees**, seriously, if even if you’re not in Australia, look up **native bees** of Australia. There are some really cool ones. My favourite is the **blue-banded bee** because it just looks cool with the blue band. It’s kind of orangey, I think, off the top of my head. We’ve got this bee poster at home—yeah, I have got strange posters at home—and I always ask my kids, “Which one’s your favourite?” and they nearly always point to the **blue-banded bee**. Because who would have thought that bees can be blue?

[00:09:28]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And they’re cute and fluffy. It’s not that hard a sell, really.

[00:09:35]
Ben Newsome: No, it’s cool. So obviously you do a lot of research and you do a bucket load in **animal behaviour**, especially around the insect world and the arachnid world and whatnot. So science communication is a thing, it’s growing and it’s becoming more and more important. So, I guess my question is—I think you’ve already sort of said it—why are you falling into this world more and more?

[00:10:03]
Dr James O’Hanlon: When we’re asked this question, we’re meant to say things like, “Oh, because science is so important and we need to share scientific discoveries and make them available to the public,” and all this nice, warm, fuzzy public service stuff. Behind all of that, I

think that people that do this stuff do it just because they love it and they can’t not do it.

[00:10:14]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, you want to spread what you do. I mean, if this is your life’s work, you want to tell people about it.

[00:10:18]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Exactly, and I don’t think it was ever actually a choice of going into science communication. It’s just something when you’re working as a scientist, you just start doing it anyway. You start teaching at universities, you start going to conferences where you give talks about your research. You start getting phone calls from radio stations wanting to talk about the latest discovery about spiders, and it just kind of snowballs from there and you find yourself doing it more and more. Then you find yourself going, “I really like this. I’

m m going to stop waiting for people to ask me to do it and just start doing it myself and putting your hand up for things.” And it’s yeah, it’s this weird sort of agreement you have to make with yourself in your own head that you realise you really enjoy communicating things, but you don’t want to act like you’re an attention seeker, that kind of thing. You don’t want to act like you’re like, “Hey everybody, look at me, look at all the cool things I’m doing.”

[00:11:03]
Dr James O’Hanlon: You want it to be clear that you’re there as an evangelist. You just want to share all these stories with as many people as possible and it’s about the things that you’re talking about. And if you can talk about them passionately, hopefully that rubs off on other people.

[00:11:18]
Ben Newsome: That’s unreal. And this is the thing—going into some of your work, especially around **InSitu Science**, it’s done an amazing job. And not just communicating in podcast form; you’ve done stuff with **Scinema** and a few things. How did that sort of kick off?

[00:11:34]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Oh, that’s a good question. It kicked off in a couple of different ways. Like I said, the **InSitu Science** podcast has sort of been the biggest branch of what **InSitu Science** does, and that came about simply because I was a little bit addicted to podcasts myself. I find myself constantly walking around with a pair of headphones in listening to podcasts on everything from science to art to comedy to sports to whatever my interests were.

[00:12:13]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Around that same time, I also just discovered that I also liked talking about stuff. But then also, and this is going to sound a little bit stupid and obvious, as a scientist I find myself spending a lot of time talking to other scientists. And no surprise that scientists are actually really interesting people that do really interesting things and I thought, you know what? Maybe we should find a way to tell these stories.

[00:12:43]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And when I started it up, there were lots of other science podcasts out there, but they were always just about the science. They were making the science accessible, they were breaking down the latest discoveries made into ways that people could understand them and that was great. And I thought, no, I’m actually more interested in the people themselves—the people behind these discoveries.

[00:13:00]
Dr James O’Hanlon: You know, we can talk about this great discovery that someone made and it comes out in a journal article or a newspaper article and you read about this discovery and how important it is. But what that article doesn’t tell you is that discovery took a team of 40 people over 10 years doing all separate jobs, and the main investigator had three children in that time.

[00:13:32]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And the reason that they used this particular methodology is because it allowed them to do time-based sampling that would let the lead researcher get her kids to sleep in time, and behind each discovery there’s an amazing story that isn’t being told. And the way I kind of saw that is, you know whenever you’re watching a movie, and if you really like a movie you then go and watch all the behind the scenes extras and you see all the cool behind the scenes secrets about how this particular effect was made or what this particular actor brought to the role and what their inspirations were.

[00:14:11]
Dr James O’Hanlon: All those stories are just as interesting as the movie themselves, and I realised we have that in science too. We have all these incredibly interesting stories about how discoveries are made and the people that make them, and those stories aren’t being told. And that’s why whenever I’m writing about what **InSitu Science** does, I often just describe it as we’re a behind the scenes look at science. We talk about actually what goes on behind the scenes—the reality about how discoveries are made.

[00:14:38]
Ben Newsome: That’s so powerful. Because I kind of think of what happens, there’s a lot of educators listen to this podcast, and the reality of the scientific method itself sometimes almost feels arcane for some students. But also to others it might seem just a methodical process of doing the science, but it almost feels removed from a human doing it in some ways to a kid who doesn’t really has never really met a scientist potentially, or see what actually happens in real research.

[00:15:19]
Ben Newsome: Understanding the background story of what they do and, you know what, they’re really interested in a particular sport or they go surfing or while they were surfing they discovered a weird thing, whatever it is. It’s those human stories that actually make a connection and will actually really help break down some of the barriers which may have been put up by people’s own misconceptions.

[00:15:47]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And as a biologist, as a field biologist, there seems to be a common theme where discoveries are made when you go to take a pee behind the bushes.

[00:15:59]
Ben Newsome: An apple falls on your head if it’s gravity, if you’re doing a physics or whatever. Yeah, I see what you mean.

[00:16:03]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Especially if you’re searching for a rare animal or an elusive animal, chances are you’ll find it when you’ve, you know, you’re hidden behind a bush and you can’t grab it at that point in time. Everybody’s got a story like that.

[00:16:16]
Ben Newsome: Mind you, sometimes you can have a bucket load of things you’ve never discovered before because you pointedly make the research trip out to go to the place that people haven’t been to yet. I mean, that’s probably a good thing. The one that’s crossing my mind right now is deep sea exploration. I mean, the sort of things that get brought up in the Antarctic have never, ever been seen before because no one’s ever been down there yet in that particular area. It can be really, really cool, and sometimes these things can be groundbreaking.

[00:16:43]
Ben Newsome: That actually just brings up a point—where have you actually done some of your field research?

[00:16:49]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Where do I start? Mostly in Australia, I guess. I started off, I’ll do this in a bit of a timeline maybe. I started off as a master’s student studying Australian **praying mantises**, and they are all up in the far north of Australia. So I was travelling all around Far North Queensland, Northern Territory, wet tropics sort of area.

[00:17:17]
Dr James O’Hanlon: My PhD was on these **orchid mantises**, so I was actually doing all my field work for those in Peninsular Malaysia. So every three months or so, jumping on a plane, going out to Kuala Lumpur, jumping in a car, driving another four hours to the rainforest, and doing stuff out there. After that, in what we call the postdoc phase of being a scientist—postdoc phase is a funny phase where you don’t just do one project, you do about 400 different projects, different casual jobs doing all sorts of different stuff.

[00:17:53]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And that’s taken me all over Eastern Australia, really. Like I said, I worked on these colour-changing grasshoppers up in the Snowy Mountains. I’ve worked on little tiny toadlets in national parks around Sydney. The last research project I did on ants took me everywhere from out to the back of Bourke—literally the back of Bourke—out to coastal rainforests of New South Wales, again back down to the Snowy Mountains. All over the place, really.

[00:18:25]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I actually started off wanting to be a scientist, wanting to do **marine science**, because I loved snorkelling and scuba diving and thought I want to spend my life out in the ocean and doing all that sort of stuff. And then I somewhere along there I turned to the dark side and became a terrestrial biologist, but at some point I’m hoping to get back to the ocean and do more stuff out there. I do miss it a bit.

[00:18:50]
Ben Newsome: It’s interesting, because I was actually thinking about the **ants** themselves. Let’s, again, think from a student perspective—often when we think about pollination, invariably we think about, like you said, bees and birds and maybe a bit of wind. And yet a lot of our native acacias and whatnot are very much ant driven. How far of a range will these ants sort of travel?

[00:19:15]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Well, it depends on the ant entirely, and that’s kind of the research that I was doing. So I should clarify—this particular thing I’m talking about is ants dispersing tree seeds. So yes, ants will pollinate flowers, they’ll go to the flower, grab some nectar, get some pollen while they’re there, disperse that about. But they also do this really other important role that’s kind of forgotten a little bit, and that’s seed dispersal.

[00:19:40]
Dr James O’Hanlon: So think about something like your acacia tree drops a little black seed. On that seed is a food reward for the ant. Fancy name is an **elaiosome**, but you don’t need to know that. They pick that up, and the idea is that they carry that seed underground into their nest, essentially planting the seed underground. And this has been studied actually for quite a long time, but people have mostly just been studying the plant side of things—what’s in it for the plant, how do they benefit, what effect does it have on the plant. People have kind of ignored the ants a little bit and what the ants are doing.

[00:20:21]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And depending on the species of ant, they could be dispersing that seed two metres, they could be dispersing that seed 100 metres. We really don’t know. But to sort of—this is a very roundabout way of answering your question, Ben, I’m sorry. But what we have discovered is there’s something actually quite cool happening with this whole ant seed dispersal system.

[00:20:45]
Dr James O’Hanlon: You’ve probably guessed that ants, they’re little, and yes they might vary a lot in how much they move seeds around, but relatively they’re not going to move them that much. They’re going to move them a couple hundred metres at most. Other plants that are dispersed by other animals, they’re going to be dispersed by things like birds eating seeds, flying away, depositing them somewhere else. They’re going to be dispersed much, much further.

[00:21:11]
Dr James O’Hanlon: So this leads us to this sort of question about, well, what does that mean for these particular plants? Are the ones that are dispersed by ants more restricted because they’re dispersed by ants? We’ve actually discovered a really cool thing where the plants that are ant dispersed, yes, have more restricted ranges, but in the long term, what this means is that those groups of plants are more **speciose**.

[00:21:35]
Ben Newsome: Okay.

[00:21:36]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Does that make sense, the word **speciose**? These particular groups of plants have much, much more species in them. They’re more diverse. And we think that’s simply because of the ant actually restricting their distribution. If you form these little pockets of populations of plants, it means that there’s more opportunity for one particular pocket of plants to diversify or to diverge and evolve in a particular direction than a separate population of plants. That’s actually leading to plant diversity.

[00:22:14]
Ben Newsome: That’s reminding me of almost **island biogeography**.

[00:22:19]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Exactly! It’s **island biogeography** but happening essentially on land without the islands, with little ants keeping them on little islands almost. It’s cool. And this is particularly a huge deal for Australia because, in case you didn’t know, we have a stupidly large amount of ants both in terms of their abundance and their diversity. There’s tons of them. Just compare this to somewhere like New Zealand. New Zealand, I think, has 11 different species of ant, different native species of ant, I guess. Australia we have over 3,000 and counting. We actually don’t know precisely.

[00:23:02]
Ben Newsome: Can I actually ask at this point, I’m really curious—that’s a massively different number. And yeah, I know Australia’s bigger and yes, we’ve got some different, slightly different ecological areas, we’ve got the tropics through the savannah areas and all the rest. But that’s a big difference, because New Zealand’s also got diverse landscape. So what’s the story with that?

[00:23:34]
Dr James O’Hanlon: The short answer is we don’t know. The long answer is it might have something to do with the fact that we’re so arid. So there’s research that’s been done a while ago by an incredible guy called **Alan Andersen**. He looked at diversity of ants and finds that ant diversity, all these different species, seem to be coming from dry, arid inland areas. And that’s a little bit backwards to what we’re all taught about how biology works in school. We’re told that the tropics is where things are. You have to go to the rainforest to see lots of different things and lots of different species. Diversity and abundance come from the tropics.

[00:24:17]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Ants are bucking the trend. If you go inland from where I am on the East Coast, the further you go inland into dry arid areas, the more and more diverse ants you’ll find. And this might have something to do with the fact that ants are just more suited to these areas because they’re hardy, they can burrow underground and live in colonies underground. They can use entire colonies to forage from large areas of land and bring food back to the nest. They’re not relying necessarily on lots of water availability; they’re not relying on there being lush trees and rainforests about them.

[00:25:03]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I think ants can just sort of out-compete other **invertebrates** in these dry desert areas. So they can sort of take over dry desert areas and there’s lots more opportunities for ants to succeed in dry arid areas.

[00:25:16]
Ben Newsome: There you go! Cool. This is

what I love about talking with researchers, because you usually find out stuff you had no idea about. That’s why you do the research. That’s really cool. Hey, one thing I did want to mention about **InSitu Science**. Obviously you’ve got the podcast and you guys are nailing it, you were finalists in the **Australian Podcast Awards** last year. Well done, by the way, with that, that’s really cool.

[00:25:35]
Dr James O’Hanlon: That was pretty exciting.

[00:25:39]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I bet! It’s quite a competitive thing to do. But what I thought was really neat is that while you’re well known for that podcast, you’re also involved with **SCINEMA**. We were lucky enough to have a chat with the team from **SCINEMA** to hear about it all in a couple of episodes ago, but that was quite cool that you’ve been involved in that yourself. What did you film and what did you do?

[00:26:16]
Dr James O’Hanlon: It’s a bit embarrassing because the film we put into **SCINEMA** was about me.

[00:26:21]
Ben Newsome: Oh, was it? Well, there you go, that’s why it was selected for it, right? So it was regarding your background and what you’ve been getting up to?

[00:26:31]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Pretty much, yeah. And honestly, I didn’t expect it to go anywhere with **SCINEMA** because **SCINEMA**’s turning into this huge, big, large film festival. It just kind of came about that I needed to throw together another video for **InSitu Science**. I’d said that I would do one by the end of the year essentially, so I had my own little internal goal, but I was just swamped with other work going on.

[00:26:59]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I should mention **InSitu Science** is still a, I do it on a volunteer basis. It’s a little side project for me. So, finding time on weekends and afternoons to do stuff. So I thought, alright, well, I don’t have time to go out into the field and make a video about someone else’s research or do something very elaborate. What I do have is a bunch of footage of animals that I’ve worked on in the past. I’ve got a couple of projects going, I’ll film myself talking about these projects.

[00:27:31]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I’ll just throw it all together and put it out there. And about that same time that I was putting it out, they were putting a call out for films into **SCINEMA**. And so I just thought, oh, well, I may as well just throw it in there and see what happens. And it ended up getting selected, and it got selected for the community screening side of **SCINEMA**.

[00:27:56]
Dr James O’Hanlon: It was up online and screened at different community events and things, which was great. And I also just really liked that the video itself wasn’t necessarily about just science; the video I put out was about how science and art are kind of the same thing and was just me rambling on about how I love doing science and I love doing art. And it’s hard for me to decide sometimes the lines between the two get a little bit blurred and I’m not sure which one I’m doing. So getting that sort of idea out there in that video, I think, yeah, was quite funny.

[00:28:29]
Ben Newsome: That’s really cool, though. It actually makes me think about the number of things that get produced in all sorts of primary schools, high schools, universities and whatnot. There is video footage hanging out there, but unless it’s exposed to people, if it’s just kept within your classrooms or your small networks, that means that people don’t get to hear about the things that you’ve been doing. So it’s really cool that you put yourself out there because you didn’t have to; you could have just kept it to yourself or just dumped it on your website. But putting it out into a competition like that meant other people actually saw your research and saw what you’re about and hopefully got inspired. That’s a really cool thing.

[00:29:01]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Yeah, and I think it also just helped me, I guess, solidify some of these ideas I’ve been having. Like I said, I’ve always done science professionally and I’ve always done art and making on the side, and actually the process of going through and making that video actually helped me solidify some ideas in my head about actually why do I feel compelled to do these two things and are they actually joined in some way or are these just two separate parts of my personality? Since having that video out there, I’ve been able to actually do a lot more art as opposed to doing more science. It’s helped me be more creative and more productive on that side of things.

[00:29:43]
Ben Newsome: And hats off for that too, because you are a research fellow at the **University of New England**. I mean, you actually have a day job to do and you need to be focused on that as well. But putting this on the above and beyond is going above and beyond and it’s really cool that you’re putting that information out there. I’ve got to ask: what are the next steps? What can you imagine yourself doing with your science communication over the next year, two years, 10 years, 40 years—whatever timeline you want to throw out there? I’m just curious as to what you can imagine coming up over the next little while.

[00:30:14]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I’m doing a hell of a lot of imagining at the moment. I’ll take a little bit of a step back. You mentioned that I was a research fellow at the **University of New England**.

[00:30:22]
Ben Newsome: Yes.

[00:30:23]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Technically, I’m not anymore. So let’s take this conversation in a bit of a different direction. You’ve heard it here first! I mentioned before that I’m in this postdoc phase of being a scientist, and some people like to call it the “funny money” stage, some people like to call it the academic limbo stage. Essentially, what scientists do is once they finish their PhD, they’re just kind of putting themselves out there, trying to get as much work done as possible until hopefully they land on one of these mythical full-time tenured positions where they’re a professor in a university and they sit there and work away in their office until they die, pretty much.

[00:31:12]
Ben Newsome: There you go, that’s a good advertisement! Come into the world!

[00:31:15]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Well, that idea of becoming that full-time tenured university professor, turns out it’s a reality for many people, it’s not a reality for most people, unfortunately. And this is sort of, again, another one of those behind the scenes stories of science. I think it’s important to get out there. Science is a really dynamic rollercoaster of a career. You think you’re going to spend your life sitting in a lab at a university working away on one big project for the rest of your life. You’re actually, most scientists are freelancers. They’re guns for hire.

[00:31:53]
Dr James O’Hanlon: They’re doing 12 different research contracts, they’re doing a whole bunch of different science communication contracts, they’re doing admin jobs, they’re doing all sorts of stuff. And that’s essentially what the phase of the career I’m in at the moment. I was on a research fellowship at the **University of New England** for three years, like you mentioned, and now I’m back in the freelance “guns for hire” stage.

[00:32:13]
Ben Newsome: I was about to say that! You beat me to it. I was about to say “guns for hire,” you beat me. That sounds like that. Wow! So you’re like a mercenary of science.

[00:32:23]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Yes! And this is where—I’m going to bring it back to your question about how I see science and art all coming together. This time in my career is where having that experience doing art is paying off, because I’m actually making a living doing art commissions and things at the moment, which is quite interesting.

[00:32:43]
Ben Newsome: So that could be lots of different things. What sorts of works?

[00:32:49]
Dr James O’Hanlon: So at the moment, I’m working on actually a children’s book that I’m illustrating as part of it. It’s still science-based. There’s a research program going on here at the **University of New England** where they’re putting together children’s books about **wetland ecology**—animals that live in wetlands and what they get up to. So we’re currently putting that book together and it’ll hopefully be getting sent out to schools early next year. I’m doing some science slash art installations for a couple of initiatives around town, and juggling that with some still some casual research work studying insect behaviour, and also a little bit of science communication work producing podcasts for some other people at the moment, actually.

[00:33:43]
Dr James O’Hanlon: This sort of brings us back around to how we opened the podcast about what hats do you have to wear at any one time. Right now, I’m wearing about 12! But you know, it’s I’m doing things that I really enjoy doing. There are times in this postdoc “funny money” stage of academia where you’re having to do things you really can’t be bothered doing. You get a casual contract doing some admin work for a department or, you know, there’s a whole bunch of assignments that someone needs marking so you spend a couple of weeks doing that, and you’re bringing money in, you’re paying the bills, but the work itself isn’t the most fulfilling thing.

[00:34:29]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Right now, I’m doing a whole bunch of different jobs and I’m in a really lucky position where I actually really enjoy all of the jobs that I’m doing. So if I could keep that stuff up, I’d quite happily keep on doing this for a while.

[00:34:37]
Ben Newsome: Wow! It’s actually really good though to hear because—I mean, I like that it’s not such a linear progression. In this case for you, it’s a multi-nodal tree. But the idea of, it’s really good for actually if you are listening as an educator, please let your students know that you don’t end up on this one track for 30 years before you discover the thing and get the Nobel Prize. The reality is that you do all sorts of different things, and some concurrently! That’s really cool. So I love that and so I guess really that actually leads me onto my next question.

[00:35:09]
Ben Newsome: Righto, so we’ve got some people that might want to do science communication. And there are lots of ways to communicate—you can draw it, you can make podcasts about it, you can video it, you can blog about it, you can do whatever you want. Irrespective of the media that you do your communication of the science, I mean, what would be some advice for people starting out going, “You know what, I want to communicate science and I want to do it well”? What would you suggest?

[00:35:31]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Can I completely reword your question?

[00:35:35]
Ben Newsome: Why not? Because it was a jumbled mess anyway!

[00:35:38]
Dr James O’Hanlon: You caged it with “irrespective of the media.” I have actually come over the opinion that that’s kind of important. And that if you want to communicate science, you go do it in the media that works for you. Because chances are, unless someone offers you a job as a full-time science communicator doing whatever, lots of the science communication you do will probably be voluntary, on the side.

[00:36:09]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Obviously, I’m guessing there’s going to be lots of school teachers listening to this, it’s their job to communicate science effectively. But if you’re a researcher or science evangelist or working in a museum—something where science communication is a passion pursuit—you have to do it in a way that works for you. As an example, when I was getting trained as a scientist, coming up through

my postgrad, everyone was talking about scientists have to get online, scientists have to have their own websites, they have to have their own Twitter accounts, they have to have their public Facebook accounts. You have to be engaging on social media, starting conversations on social media because that’s where everyone is, things go viral on social media, that’s how you get the information out there, all that kind of stuff.

[00:36:31]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And I tried that for a little bit, but in the end I just had to go, you know what? I

really don’t like social media. And I’m personally not good at it. You know, there are people who get on places like Twitter and they start conversations—they engage with people, they reach out to people, people reach out to them. They’re very good at it in that sense—they’re using it how it should be used.

[00:37:10]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Then there are other people who really just jump on Twitter every now and again and go, “Hey look, I did this thing. Look at it, okay? Moving on.” I was one of those people. I just wasn’t very good at it and I thought, you know what, I’m also a terrible procrastinator. So when I get on social media, I can just spend a whole lot of time just scrolling through nonsense and not getting any work done.

[00:37:41]
Dr James O’Hanlon: So I kind of had to make an agreement with myself that, “Yep, social media is very important, but I’m not the person to be doing it.” And I found other ways of doing science communication that worked, my way of doing things. I don’t like the short soundbite or tweet style of communication where it’s just single statements; I like having long in-depth discussions with people about important topics. So surprise, surprise, I started up an interview podcast!

[00:38:19]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I like art and creativity, so I’ve done science communication through those avenues. And I think that would be my advice to people: find the way that you like to communicate and do it that way. Because if you try and force yourself to do it in a different media, you’re going to do a bad job of it and do a disservice to yourself and to the science, I think.

[00:38:41]
Dr James O’Hanlon: If your thing is writing, write stories, write newspaper articles. If your thing is music, write songs. I was actually talking to two friends of mine that have their own company now called **Faunaverse**, and they’re publishing books about Australian wildlife in poetry because they love photography and they love poetry. So they’re putting together books with amazing pictures of animals and amazing poems about animals, and they’re doing great because it’s what they do and it’s what they love.

[00:39:16]
Ben Newsome: Can I just ask—is that Dr Sam Illingworth from UWA? It might be someone else, though. I know he does a lot of those.

[00:39:21]
Dr James O’Hanlon: No, Alexander and Jane Dudley. Two people that live out in regional New South Wales doing science outreach and education and, yeah, amazing couple. Check them out.

[00:39:33]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, so I agree—definitely choose your media, do it well, is an important thing. And I kind of feel like scientists kind of get almost told to a little bit, spoken to, lectured to, so to speak—”you should be doing this thing.” And the reality is that they’re busy people and got to work within people’s strengths. I agree with that. It almost feels like being told what to do in some ways.

[00:40:12]
Dr James O’Hanlon: It must be frustrating actually as a researcher to go, “Hang on, but my work is good! And that’s what also matters, right?” So I suppose it’s a bit of a balance, yeah?

[00:40:25]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Yeah, and there are definitely some incredible, amazing scientists out there that, let’s face it, shouldn’t be communicating science.

[00:40:40]
Ben Newsome: Oh, that’s a point, because yeah!

[00:40:42]
Dr James O’Hanlon: And you know, their managers can be on their back saying “we need you out there, we need you talking to the public” and stuff and it’s kind of like, well no—if their strength is doing amazing science, let’s let them do that. And if they can’t communicate it well themselves, luckily we have a whole bunch of amazing science communicators out there that can help them with that.

[00:41:07]
Ben Newsome: They can distill the message and get it to the right audience at the right level. And that is so important. Let’s be honest—as educators, that’s our job too. No point trying to do over-the-top crazy physics to a year three student who still doesn’t know how push and pull works. So it’s just, you take the time to work, you know, say it in the right vocabulary with the right amount of syllables to the right people, and also that they can understand the concept deeply where you give them a story that they can hook to. It’s important.

[00:41:43]
Ben Newsome: Thank you very much! It is a busy time for you—you’ve got art to make as well as the science and all the rest. But look, thank you very much for dropping by for this podcast. What you’re doing within **InSitu Science** with the team is really cool. I love that you’re getting out there and doing this stuff and getting the background information about the research. Because we could just hear about research all the time, there’s plenty of publications that talk about research, but hearing about the scientists themselves, that’s a different story and I think it’s really cool.

[00:42:27]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Thanks so much! And I guess, because I know lots of educators listen to this and they want to make science accessible to everyone, I had a revelation a while ago that ties in with me looking at science behind the scenes. I realised that all science, at the most fundamental level, is just counting.

[00:42:53]
Ben Newsome: I guess so.

[00:42:55]
Dr James O’Hanlon: If you can count, then you can do science. And yeah, there’s sorts of fancy ways that you can count things. Maybe you need a laser to shoot at something out into space and count how many blips of that laser come back. Maybe you need some sort of special chemical equipment to measure things and count how many peaks on a spectrograph there are. But if we’re trying to make science accessible to everyone, I think at the end of the day, if a person can count, they can do science.

[00:43:33]
Dr James O’Hanlon: They can count one group of things and then count a second group of things and go, “Oh look, that first group’s got more than the other group.” That’s essentially all science is at the end of the day. I’ve done experiments where there’s all this sort of high concept theoretical basis behind it, but on the ground the experiment that I’m doing is just counting how many bees fly to a flower within an hour, or how many ants walk up to a tree seed. And that’s science that a ten year old can do, and I’m a PhD and I’m doing that exact same thing.

[00:44:22]
Ben Newsome: That’s true! And also because mathematics is a universal language, it means that you can transfer that information even if people can’t read it so well, they can understand your graph or your table because you’re using numerals. It’s a useful thing, and throw an equation in there and they can then do the work themselves. It is very important. Trying to get mathematics out to students—that this is actually a really handy tool no matter what you do. Sometimes kids mightn’t believe you, but the more times you put it out there to show them, everything from ordering some food from a shop through to doing research, it all involves counting in some way, shape or form.

[00:45:06]
Dr James O’Hanlon: Yeah, to the maths teachers listening out there—you are national heroes! I was one of those kids that was plagued by not very good maths teachers in schools and failed to show me how mathematics is the key to understanding the universe. And I think that’s a great shame. If you can get that across to people, thank you, you’re doing a great job.

[00:45:29]
Ben Newsome: Nailed it. That’s why they put that M in that STEM acronym for very good reason! Look, much appreciated, James. Totally agree with what you’re saying and well done with honestly your endeavours—plural—because you’re doing a lot of cool things. I’m very curious to see what you get up to over the next little while. Because yes, you are in that “funny money” sort of world, but the reality is that we’ve just got to do cool stuff. And you are.

[00:45:59]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I’m also looking forward to seeing what I get up to this time! It’s like a “choose your own adventure,” right? You can find out what the story ends up being, you can guide it a little bit. And like we were talking about before, the whole world is in a state of flux at the moment and so I’m just kind of riding this wave and seeing where we end up. I’m kind of having fun with it.

[00:45:59]
Dr James O’Hanlon: I’m also looking forward to seeing what I get up to this time! It’s like a “choose your own adventure,” right? You can find out what the story ends up being, you can guide it a little bit. And like we were talking about before, the whole world is in a state of flux at the moment and so I’m just kind of riding this wave and seeing where we end up. I’m kind of having fun with it. Thanks so much, Ben.

[00:46:12]
Ben Newsome: Thanks, James, have a great one!

Frequently Asked Questions

How can scientists bridge the gap between academia and the public?

Dr James O’Hanlon suggests that humanising scientists is key. By moving away from the ‘ivory tower’ image and sharing the personal motivations, failures, and stories behind the research, scientists can build a more relatable and trustworthy connection with the community. Science is a human endeavour, and highlighting the people involved makes the data more accessible.

What role does art play in science communication?

Art serves as a powerful bridge for engagement. James uses macro photography and illustration to capture the ‘weird and wonderful’ details of nature, such as the mimicry of orchid mantises. These visual elements grab attention and provide a gateway for deeper scientific discussions, making complex evolutionary concepts easier for a general audience to visualise and understand.

Why is it important to show the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of science?

Traditionally, only the polished final results of scientific studies are shared. However, James emphasises that showing the ‘messy’ part of the process—fieldwork challenges, equipment malfunctions, and the slow pace of discovery—helps the public understand how science actually works. This transparency fosters a better appreciation for the scientific method and the rigour required in research.

What is the benefit of using podcasts for science outreach?

Podcasts like In Situ Science allow for long-form, conversational storytelling that traditional media often lacks. This format provides space for researchers to discuss their work in an informal setting, allowing their passion and personality to shine through. It creates a sense of intimacy and inclusion for the listener, as if they are sitting in on a genuine conversation between experts.

How can educators encourage students to become better science communicators?

Educators should encourage students to view themselves as storytellers. By integrating creative tasks—such as filming a short video about an experiment or sketching a biological specimen—students learn how to translate technical information into engaging narratives. This approach reinforces their own understanding while developing essential skills for sharing knowledge with others.

Discussion points summarised from the Better Science Communication with Dr James O’Hanlon with AI assistance, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Power of Visual Literacy

In an age of rapid information consumption, the ability to communicate science through high-quality visuals is becoming as important as the data itself. We should consider how macro photography and digital art can be formalised within STEM curricula to help students share their findings with a global audience.
Visual storytelling doesn’t just decorate science; it defines how the public perceives the value of natural biodiversity and conservation efforts.

Democratising the Scientific Process

If the public only sees science as a series of ‘breakthroughs’ in news headlines, they miss the reality of incremental progress and peer review. How can we better involve the community in the ‘in-between’ stages of research to build long-term trust in scientific institutions?
Initiatives like citizen science and behind-the-scenes podcasting are steps toward making science a shared cultural experience rather than an exclusive professional one.