College of Forestry

WFGRS-RAFWE 2024 Keynote Speakers || Abby Phillip Metzger and Julia K. Parrish

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Abby Phillip Metzger, Author | Finding your science story: Conversation, community, and compassion

We often hear that graduate students and researchers need to share their science with society, but few formal training programs exist at universities. Complicating matters, some studies have questioned the effectiveness of science communication trainings, and still prevailing is the dreaded deficit model—the idea that non-scientific audiences have a knowledge gap that only scientific information can fill. With the urgency of our warming world upon us, how do we make our science matter and help inspire transformative solutions? Rather than complicated frameworks, the answer may be more basic: Storytelling, the ancient art that has connected communities and inspired interest, action, and hope for centuries. In this talk, science writer and communicator Abby Phillips Metzger shared philosophical and practical insights to discovering your science story, using conversation and understanding to engage diverse communities.

Abby Phillips Metzger is a science communicator, author, paddler, and mother. Prior to her current appointment as the Communications Director for Global Forest Generation, she worked for nearly a decade as a science writer and communicator in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at OSU. She has also worked in journalism, book publishing, and environmental education. Abby is the author of Meander Scars, a series of essays about river restoration; and a co-editor of Wild in the Willamette, a collection of outdoor adventures within the mid-Willamette Valley watersheds. Her writing was recently recognized as a top pick for the Best Shortform Science Writing and the Best of the Northwest Science Writing Awards. She lives near the Willamette River with her husband and two children. 

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Julia K. Parrish, University of Washington | Citizen Science, Community Science, and Science Identity in a Warming World

Julia K. Parrish is the Lowell A. and Frankie L. Wakefield Professor of Ocean Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of the Environment.  As Associate Dean, she helped bring two exciting efforts to increase inclusion in science into the College: Seattle MESA – a pipeline program providing hands-on science, math, and engineering opportunities for middle and high school students; and the Doris Duke Conservation Scholar’s Program at UW, a national summer program for undergraduates fusing the concerns of ecosystem conservation, equity and inclusion. Julia is a marine biologist, a conservation biologist, and a specialist in citizen science.  For more than 30 years, Julia has conducted field research on seabirds, focused on the natural and human-caused factors causing population declines. Julia is also the Executive Director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a 23-year-old citizen science program responsible for training more than 5,000 participants to collect monthly data on the identity and abundance of beach-cast birds from northern California north to the Arctic Circle and west to the Commander Islands in Russia. She is an Elected Fellow of the American Ornithological Union, the Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow; and has been honored with the UW Distinguished Teaching Award for her excellence in the classroom. She received her undergraduate degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, her PhD from Duke University, where she studied the schooling behavior of fish, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA.

2024 WORKSHOPS

Proposal Writing Workshop with Selina Heppell  |  Preparing for an Academic Job with Selina Heppell

Media Training with Sean Nealon and Steven Lundeberg  |  Getting Started on Github with Christopher Cousins

The event is co-organized by graduate students in the College of Forestry and the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences.