When Scientists and Policy Makers Speak the Same Language

DEEP POCKETS

Season 4, Episode 9 

Transcript

Welcome to Deep Pockets with Petra Söderling, the show about governments and innovation. With each episode, we bring you a person and a topic that is part of this larger concept of how countries and regions can create economic advantage by investing in innovation. We're now in season four. 

Can you believe it? I call this season the random rendezvous. After organizing, scripting, interviewing, editing and marketing 27 episodes, I wanted to give myself a little slack. This season, I will invite interesting people I meet online in events or through work. It will be an open mic approach, no scripting, no theme, just me and the guest talking about whatever we feel like, for how long we feel like. Our theme song is by New Orleans Jazz icon Leroy Jones. 

I hope you enjoy this and other episodes. The impact of technology has become overwhelmingly strong in our societies and in our lives. Technology impacts our personal privacy, our personal safety, but also our national safety, political stability and even financial well-being. If we think about new fields of science and technology coming into mainstream commercial use, most recently AI and increasingly quantum come to mind, what are the types of things that we should be doing now in order to avoid unwanted consequences in the future? Emerging technologies are technologies that still foster that umbilical cord to science. Scientists carry out research, which sometimes but not always leads to product development. As for policymakers, they are the ones to allocate resources to science and to ensure that the result of science will benefit and not harm their society. 

So how should scientists and policymakers talk to each other? My guest today is someone who knows this world inside out. Christina Willis is the founder of Virtue Cycles. After completing her graduate work, Christina worked in industry for several years as a laser scientist, primarily building lasers used for measurements at a distance for space and flight applications. She then made a transition into policy work with a congressional fellowship through the American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS, where she worked for a year on a Senate subcommittee staff. 

After moving to Colorado, she worked for a session in the Colorado General Assembly before finding her current role. Welcome to Deep Pockets, Christina. Thank you so much for having me Petra. It's a pleasure to be here. I'd like to start by asking my guests to properly introduce themselves. So tell our listeners your journey to becoming the person you are now. 

No, thank you Petra. Yeah, I began my career in science. So I studied physics as an undergraduate and then for graduate school, I studied optics, which is the science of light, and subsequently went to work as a laser scientist in industry for several years. As a graduate student, I did a lot of science advocacy. So my professional society would take a group of scientists to Washington, DC, to go have meetings with congressional offices to advocate for science. And through that process, I learned a lot about how Congress functions and got really, got really excited every time I got to do those because it's the opportunity to share about science with someone who might not know a lot about it and get them excited and enthused. 

And the fact that that could make an impact on how policy and science policy was shaped was really exciting to me. So after working as a laser scientist for several years, I applied for a congressional fellowship through the AAAS, which you mentioned at the top of the intro. And this is a great program that takes people with terminal technical degrees like PhDs and MDs and puts them in federal offices and government offices. And so I did the congressional fellowship where I got to work in Congress, but there was also fellowships across the federal government at the State Department, the FDA, the EPA. And this gives those offices the opportunity to have someone who has the ability to look at hard scientific data, analyze it, synthesize it, and translate it in a way that a non-scientist can understand and to use that ability to do research in a way to create more data-driven policy. And that can be policy that isn't necessarily about science, but it's using the science to support the creation of new policy. And so it's an amazing program. 

I highly recommend anyone who's eligible to take a look at it. I learned so much through that opportunity. And so during that time, I was working on a subcommittee staff in the Senate, and I got to work in that position for a year. After that, I moved to the state of Colorado where I continued working in policy at the state level. 

I got to work in Colorado's legislature. And that was a fascinating eye-opening experience going from federal level Congress to state level Congress and to see the differences between the two. And there are some very striking differences. Primarily, you have a wild difference in the number of staff a legislator has. So the senator that I worked for in Washington, D.C. had a staff of over 30. I was one of one and a half staff members that my boss had working in Colorado. 

This is a very different dynamic on a lot of different levels. And then I ended up working in quantum technology for the first time, shortly thereafter. And that had a nice transition because I had the skill set in optics and many different quantum modalities, as I'm sure you're aware, use optics. And so it was kind of a nice transition where I got to work doing legislative affairs work for a technology company. And I also founded my company Virtuous Cycles where I give workshops on professional development for graduate students. So I actually work on teaching new early career scientists how to communicate their science as well. That's terrific. 

Thank you. So on this topic of public policy and science, we got to know each other through quantum. And if we think about the quantum industry, for example, several countries recently announced something called expert controls to quantum technologies. What are expert controls? Well, expert controls are a set of requirements that control what type of dual use technologies. In other words, technologies that can be used both for defense as well as for civilian use. 

So what type of technologies can be exported outside of your country and where to which countries? And for quantum, some people said it was too early to introduce expert controls. Some said it's just the right time. Some people criticized the details, the requirements of these technologies. So is this inevitably an eternal problem between the innovators and the policymakers where policymakers find it hard to decide when is the right time to make a measure and how strong the measure should be? And another example, we can think about the recent AI regulations that EU passed. Also, they were being criticized to be too early. They were also criticized to be too late. So I guess my question is, Christina, would it be better if scientists and policymakers got together before these products are being used by companies and consumers? 

That's a great question, Petra. And expert controls are an incredibly complex topic, especially on the topic of emerging technologies like quantum technology. And how scientists can play a role in that is, I think, through programs like the AAAS fellowships and simply in scientists being involved in the conversation makes a big difference in these, the creation of these export controls for these more emerging technologies. To make good export controls, one has to have a good understanding of the science. And so having a member of your team who is trained in an area of science to be able to leverage, to understand the complexities of the technology and thus be able to craft good export controls is really critical. So my message here would really be for people working in policy, if you can hire scientists in as member of your team, that's an amazing way that can help to craft the best possible export controls. But then I have a message also for scientists that you can make a huge difference in the world and make a significant impact by getting involved in creating policy and export controls. 

There's just one example of many of those possibilities. I would say in specific to export controls and quantum technology, I think it's a really, really tricky problem because we're in what I like to call the wild west of quantum technology right now, where you have all these different ways to make quantum things. You can use atoms, you can use ions, you can use photons, you can use Josephson functions. There's just such a plethora of ways to make quantum things. 

And no one really knows what modality is going to be the winning modality or if one modality will win for computing and one modality will win for networking or how they're all worked together. And so in that place where you have this just absolute diversity of ways to make quantum things and makes benchmarking really difficult and it makes creating export controls really specific. So the export controls that came out have a large impact on some modalities and less of an impact on other modalities. 

So it's at this stage because of the diversity in the field, it makes it an extra layer of difficulty and I think building extra controls. Yeah, I guess the argument that governments shouldn't pick winners and losers come to mind here. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. 

Yeah. And that's something that for the National Quantum Initiative Act and also for the reauthorization that's coming up in the United States, it was really crafted in a way that tried to have a neutral approach to or an agnostic approach perhaps to modality across quantum technologies so that it's really allowing each of the modalities to come to the fruition to see what the best one is. Whereas if you nip things in the bud early and pick, oh, these will be the two modalities we focus on, we're going to ignore the others, you might end up picking something ultimately that once it plays out isn't the best option. So that's I think a really important element of government policy and innovation is that there was an agnosticism to what modalities used so really you can see and run through the full experiment what what will work out best. 

Yeah, I do want to say that people that we know who work in the White House Office of Science and Technology who work at QEDC who influence, I think they are remarkable scientists on their own. Absolutely. Merit. Yes. 

Yeah, so we do have some really, really good people in government. Definitely. Did you want to add something else? Oh, no, I'll just comment on that and that there are definitely already a lot of really amazing scientists involved in the creation of policy and we need more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is interesting. 

Thanks for that. So you have been personally to the Hill, which is the US Congress, and you've helped facilitate these conversations between Congress members and researchers or companies who create these products and businesses from emerging technologies. So I'm sure our audience would like to understand how these hearings are organized, I would. 

What goes on behind the scenes as the legislative aid to a Colorado senator as well, you were in the receiving end of the conversation when companies would want to deliver a message to the senator. So in your view, in your experience, are these conversations useful? Are they smooth? Are there any challenges? How are they going? 

Thank you, Petra. So I'll address this question in kind of two parts. One, I'll talk about process and hearings and that kind of how legislation functions. And then on the other hand, I'll address the question separately of the flow of conversations between staff and industry. So in my role as a fellow, I functioned equivalently to a legislative assistant where I had a portfolio of topics that I was supposed to develop legislation in. 

And that was my day to day. So doing research, reading prior legislation, talking to experts, talking to agencies and trying to craft solutions that fit within my portfolio. When we come to hearings and markups, that gets really interesting as part of why I wanted to work on a committee. Because once a piece of legislation is introduced, it gets assigned to a committee, and the chair of that committee decides whether or not that bill gets to progress. So the chair functions as a really important and powerful filter for what legislation gets passed eventually, because it has to go through committee markup first. And so as a fellow, I would assist with markup where everyone would get notified by the chair what bills were going to be marked up so the chair makes their decision. 

And then you write up a brief summary of the bills that you are assigned because there's a lot of them, they get divvied up. You write up a brief summary, and based on what you know about your boss, you offer a vote recommendation, knowing what they tend to prefer and like and what their priorities are you write about recommendation. And this gets compiled across the full staff, and it gets run up to the very late various layers of the sort of hierarchy within the office, until it gets sort of refined and improved to a point where the boss gets to review it. The boss reviews it, and you know she might choose to change a vote recommendation, or the thing, there might be additional information from different layers of stuff. But ultimately that document gets refined to a point where the boss reviews it and then takes a finalized version to the hearing to the markup and passes votes on the different bills and those votes across all the committee members or what determines whether or not the bill passes out of committee, which it has to do before it gets to go to the floor of the legislature for the whole governing body to vote on it. 

And then you have to do that twice. You have to do it on the House side, and you have to do the congressional side and a lot of times in those process amendments get offered either at the committee level, or at the floor level. And then you have to go through conference, which is the integration of the two bills into one before that can go to be signed by the president so getting to be part of a committee and an integral part of that process is really interesting. So as to the question of conversations between staff and industry and so I've, I've functioned in this role, both on the staff side on the scientist advocate side, and on the now the legislative affairs the lobbyist side. And an important thing to remember about staff, even when a legislator has a large staff, those staff members still have a broad portfolio. 

This is much more true on the House side where staffs are smaller than on the Senate side, but they're not just covering one little narrow topic they have an array of topics, and they're doing things like working on markups they might be writing remarks for their boss, they are working on their own legislative projects so they're very busy working across a breadth of topics. So when speaking to staff, it's really important to do as much legwork and provide as much context as possible for your issue. When you go to talk to them, because if you leave any gaps they don't have the time to fill in those gaps those are things that are just lost. So remembering that if they've agreed to give you some of their time, that's, that's a privilege in a sense like that they are so busy that they've carved out some of their time for you. So you want to come and offer them everything they might possibly need to understand your request that you're asking for. I am including you can send as follow ups one or two pages these documents need to be brief again because reading takes time, but offering materials reference materials for them for after the meeting. 

And it's interesting to me that at least from my experience, Congress in Washington DC is very old school. I never use or saw slides like coming with a computer to show slides it's just not a thing that's done. Oh, typically what happens in one of these meetings is you sit around a table face to face and you just talk face to face. And the staffer takes notes in a physical notebook with like pen and paper. That is the level of technology for these meetings. Okay, so the pandemic had this really interesting interaction with that because now it's possible to do virtual meetings which is not a thing you did before before you had to show up in person to have these face to face interaction. 

And then if you have documentation or materials you send those as follow ups, essentially, so it's culturally very different place from a lot of the other sort of modern work life. Yeah. I've never heard the Congress members being referred to as boss by the way I think that's really cool. 

Oh yeah absolutely everyone everyone refers to the boss or my boss. Okay. Yeah. Okay, great. 

Thank you. So, do you see any disconnects in terms of scientists trying to talk to lawmakers or any disconnects when anyone scientist or otherwise try to engage with congressional staff. What should audience members know about the life of a congressional staffer that will help them to communicate. 

Great question. And I will refer briefly if anyone has seen the film don't look up. Oh, there's an amazing moment in this film where a scientist played by Leonardo DiCaprio is meeting the president's chief of staff. And the message he ultimately wants to convey is that there is a annihilation level asteroid approaching Earth. 

And we're all going to die. Yeah. And he starts talking about the physical characteristics and classification of the asteroid. 

Right. Because these as a scientist these are really important details to him like this is his his field of research. And this is what he always does with asteroids is he classifies them in this way and talks about their mineral content and all of this. And it's an excellent example of something that I see play out many times is that scientists live in the details of their research. But a lot of times the intimate details of their research aren't necessary information to explain the the level of context to explain what they're asking for. Right. Yeah. And so those nitty gritty details can ultimately become a distraction from conveying the message. 

And so it's really important for scientists to do their best to try and imagine what it's like to not know all the science and really explain in a way that OK this person, the staff member maybe the last science science class they took was in high school. Right. And so they have they're super smart. They're really competent. They are very accomplished but they may not have a lot of science. And so using recognizing that using certain science words and science jargon is actually going to create noise in the signal that they're trying to convey. 

And that it's really hard because psychology shows this effect called the curse of knowledge, which is the more you know the thing, the harder it is for you to remember what it was like to not know. Oh, yeah. Right. So the further in a career a scientist gets the harder it is for them to relate to someone who's not a scientist. And it's entirely possible to overcome the curse of knowledge, but it takes practice. It takes really working at adapting the message to different audiences, really trying to empathize to remember OK, this person doesn't know any of this like physics that I'm used to referring to and to find a way to explain that physics without assuming someone studied physics. 

And it's a challenging problem. We've also spoken about modalities in this show, like you and I refer to quantum modalities, we didn't explain what the modalities are. So I think we'll do that. And you don't need to explain it by the way I'll put in the show notes, I'll explain. 

So please continue. Yeah, so I would say that in those that is where scientists really tend to get caught up is not remembering that someone's not going to know what is a nanometer or what is a valence electron and to know how to try and if you absolutely have to introduce that concept. Introduce it from the beginning, explain it in a way that now when you refer to it someone will understand and not making those assumptions. So, and, and then also remembering that staffers sometimes, you know, they have very busy schedules. Sometimes you may have a 30 minute meeting scheduled which feels like nothing and something comes up and they have to leave at the 15 minute mark. So something that's also very common in a congressional context is the bluff the bottom line up front. Right, so you want to basically give the abstract of all of your points what you're asking for why you're asking for it at the very top of the meeting. And then you spend the rest of the meeting explaining and giving context so that they understand, like what really motivates this request, but you need to be prepared for the fact that you may not get your whole 30 minutes in your meeting, and that you may only have 10. And if you spent those 10 minutes leading up to your request, you've missed your opportunity to give you a request. Wow. Last question. What are some of the things that excite you at the moment. 

Oh, so many things. So, in terms of talking about quantum technology and the kind of more broader view. I think it's really exciting to see quantum sensors, maturing to a point that they really are ready to be in the field. Because you know one of the amazing things about quantum technology is the precision, the sort of order of magnitude level of sensitivity increase that it offers, and of the quantum technologies broadly categorized as computing networking and sensing. And when I say sensing, I also include atomic clocks, measurement of time, sensing of time. Of those three categories, the sensors are the most mature, and they really are to a point where you can actually start to buy quantum technology in a box off the shelf and get this level of improvement. So, we are in the wild west, but we are getting, we are starting, we're maturing and this most mature set of technologies is really going to start making a huge impact in terms of how we measure things and how we function on a daily basis. 

So that's really exciting. On a personal note, I mentioned my public speaking. So I am actually in the process of I just developed some new workshops. 

And one of those workshops is to teach graduate students or early career scientists ways to optimize their conference experience, especially if you're going to a large conference with so many simultaneous and competing events, lots of networking opportunities, particularly. There's a huge amount of things that you can do in advance, like in terms of planning your schedule scheduling meetings, but also identifying moments where I'm going to be really stressed out I'm going to have given a presentation and then there's a big reception and I'm going to be totally exhausted, planning time for self care, which is not a lot of not something we talk about a lot in science and necessarily work. Right, maybe it comes in a little bit in that work life balance conversation, but really being strategic about when am I going to need a little bit of downtime when am I going to need to recover because when we practice that self care, we perform better. 

Right. So if we've taken care of ourselves before well rested if we're well fed, we're going to interact better with others or networking is going to be more productive or performance delivering talks is going to be active. So it's a really it's a message I'm really excited about. And I'm going to be working on turning it into an online on demand course, which is going to be my first time doing something like that. So I'm very excited about that on a personal level. 

I love it. This has been Christina Willis, founder of the Virtue Cyples, the director of external and government affairs at inflection, author, firefighter. Thank you for coming to Deep Pockets, Christina. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight. The wonderful music you heard is by Leroy Jones, an iconic New Orleans jazz hall of fame trumpetist. 

You can find this and other Leroy Jones tunes at your favorite online or offline music store. Thanks for listening and be sure to subscribe, like, rate and share our episodes. It means a lot to me and to my guests. Thank you. .