Hey there! I’m Annie, and I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. Early this year, I received my PhD from the Department of Communication & Media at the University of Michigan (go blue). I grew up in Texas and went to the University of Texas at Austin (hook’em), where I got my Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a certificate in computer programming.
(Yep, chemistry.) For nearly two years, plus a summer at the U.S. Department of Energy, I helped make these cool-looking branched molecules called dendrimers. The dendrimers would house different, smaller particles (nanoparticles). Together, these dendrimer-encapsulated nanoparticles (DENs, as they are so aptly called) literally served as a den of magic: they sped up (catalyzed) the decomposition of an acid to produce hydrogen gas, giving us a safe and sustainable source of clean energy.
“So…how did you go from that to wanting to study communication” is a question I get a lot from people (my mom, for one, still asks me…).
As I look back, though, it felt almost inevitable—that the countless hours I spent creating dendrimers turned into, well, a dendrimer of sorts in its own way.
Questions of “how can I get these nanoparticles to stabilize inside this dendrimer” branched into “what does a path forward to clean energy actually look like for these DENs” to “how will the public get to know about these cool molecules, support them, and benefit from them?” And those questions became the catalyst for my decision, last year of college, to look into something called “science and environmental communication. It was there that I began to make sense of the questions I was asking—the different processes and strategies in which my research could leave the lab and take on a whole different life of its own, how different forms of media facilitated that, the ways in which audiences could respond to my research as informed by their own livelihoods and experiences, all before translating into public support (or opposition, of course) to clean energy policies and research (and to complete the full circle, the very funding that supported my own dendrimer creations in the lab!)
And of course, studying communication is pretty different from chemistry, but I very much still see my current research as an extension of, and motivated by, my past work and experiences. After all, my work on scientists on social media is inspired by the public engagement undertaken by many of my former colleagues and close friends, who use their platforms to share their awe-inspiring research and stories with the public. And I hope my research on effective strategies in science communication and promoting public perceptions of science and scientists can likewise inform theirs. So…just a different branch of research on that same dendrimer, you could call it.
Outside of PhD-ing, I run a food blog with my partner called Hungry Mind, Hungry Stomach. We enjoy reviewing restaurants and coffee shops across the country, and are constantly on the lookout for new places to try (so if you have any recommendations, drop them our way!).
We’ve also got a running list of the best iced oat milk lattes we’ve ever tried—spanning the entire globe—but apparently that’s controversial, so it remains unposted. 😂
That said, you’ll often find me in a coffee shop, where I’m in the middle of a Haruki Murakami marathon (just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), or taking a quick run around the city, where I’m trying to hype myself up for an (actual) (half-) marathon.
Annie Li Zhang 