Sonia Fernandez has always gravitated to writing about science. After spending several years as a general news journalist, she’s found her passion working for her alma mater, University of California, Santa Barbara, as Senior Science Writer. She covers the U.S. university’s many science disciplines, from engineering to medicine to physics. But an assignment centered on one of Southern California’s most well-known urban beaches took her passion to a heightened level. 

“I live in a beach community, so marine ecology is personal for me,” she says. “And with so many troubling climate change stories in the news these days, it was thrilling to write about one with a positive spin.”

Her 2023 article for UCSB’s The Current, an online news outlet, on dune restoration won her a gold Circle of Excellence Award. It chronicles a years-long experiment to determine if dune restoration could increase the resilience of Southern California’s urban beaches to sea level rise. Or as Fernandez describes it in her article, “a six-year alliance between sand, wind, and vegetation.”

ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE: Sonia Fernandez, Senior Science Writer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, won a gold COE Award for a marine ecology story on dune restoration. 

Credit: Karina Johnson

She interviewed researchers from UCSB’s Marine Science Institute and the Bren School for Environmental Science & Management, and from UC Los Angeles about their study on using nature to offset the effects of rising sea levels due to warming oceans and other environmental factors. She also got perspectives from Santa Monica city planners and residents who were partners with the reseachers in the radical move to halt the practice of “beach grooming,” also known as “raking,” which makes beaches flatter and more attractive to tourists. 

The promising results of the study were published in Frontiers in Marine Science, a scholarly journal that most likely would never find its way to the general public. But presenting the research to the public is exactly what Fernandez accomplished with prose like: “Over the last several years, the residents of Santa Monica, a coastal city on the edge of Los Angeles, saw something neither they, their parents, or perhaps even their grandparents had ever seen before: a three-foot-tall dune system rising gently from the flat, groomed expanse of one of the world’s most famous urban beaches.”

“I really vibed with the ideas of cooperation and solutions,” says Fernandez. “The story featured scientists, nature, community—all working in unison.”
COE judges felt likewise, commending the article for “engaging a wider audience in the conversation about environmental protection and community involvement.”

And therein lies the mission—and the challenge—of higher education science writers. 

In labs, in libraries, in fields, and in their offices, higher education researchers the world over are conducting trials, testing theories, and researching history. They have questions that need answering, hypotheses that need to be proved, and sometimes it takes years to achieve their goals, if at all. They celebrate when they have outcomes to share in peer-reviewed journals read by fellow scientists and researchers in their select fields. 

So how do the rest of us find out about breakthroughs and landmark discoveries that have the potential to impact our lives? 

Enter the talented university communicators who employ their passion, curiosity, and storytelling skills to elucidate complex topics. In 2024, of the 53 Circle of Excellence winners in writing categories, about one third of them shined a spotlight on the research and science quietly taking place on their campuses. Here, five winning writers share their passion for science storytelling, along with their best advice. 

A Stellar Cover Story

In May 2022, a team of international researchers called the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration produced the first image of Sagittarius A*, the massive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way. Richard Anantua, a physics professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, U.S., was a member of the team. 

Shea Conner, Multimedia Editor at UTSA, wrote about the discovery for Sombrilla, the university’s magazine. He is not exclusively a science writer. In fact, he started his career as an arts and entertainment reporter for a Missouri newspaper. 

“Whether I am writing about a musician or an astronomer, I’m trying to find out what inspires and motivates a person,” says Conner. “That’s the easiest place for the reader to meet you.”

He recalls being 45 minutes into the interview with Anantua, “and he’s still explaining the black hole discovery. I wasn’t seeing his personality.” That’s when Conner found an opportunity to interject a provocative question: “How groundbreaking was it to capture this image?” he asked.

“All of a sudden, I saw him open up,” says Conner. “He was talking about what he read in astronomy textbooks growing up and how he was now part of something that would be in astronomy textbooks going forward. I felt his curiosity. Even when you are writing about something scientific or technical, it’s important to convey these moments of humanity.” 

BLACK HOLES AND BEYOND: Shea Conner, Multimedia Editor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, explores space science in “A Roadrunner’s Guide to the Galaxy.” 

Credit: UTSA Sombrilla Magazine

The piece about Sagittarius A* was one of seven short profiles plus three sidebars that made up the COE award-winning cover story, “The Roadrunner’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Conner, with the help of strong design by Coral Diaz, knit together stories about the wide-ranging space research taking place at UTSA (from the James Webb Telescope to space habitats to planetary weather) into one cohesive package. The judges took note, acknowledging that “roundup stories are always a challenge to organize and make engaging, and the team rose to the challenge with this one.”

The spring 2023 cover story came on the heels of the university’s February 2022 designation as a Carnegie R1 research institution.

“We needed a big cover story that showcased our research relevance on a national and international stage,” says Conner. 

The judges agreed that the feature showcased the institution’s “research prominence” bridging “technical research with broader audience appeal, highlighting UTSA’s achievements and enhancing its credibility.”

And, as Conner himself hinted, it may well have dimmed the shadow cast by that other Texas city, proving that Houston is not the only place in the state where researchers are answering the call “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”  

Having Some Fun 

Higher education science writers aren’t just breaking down highly complex subjects into accessible formats with aplomb. Many are also bringing these stories to wider audiences with a sense of humor. 

Take Bruce Goldman’s self-described “tongue-in-cheek” approach to his article, “Why We Overvalue Things.” With the use of relatable examples, the Senior Science Writer at the Stanford University School of Medicine (California, U.S.) describes how dopamine in the middle part of the brain called the striatum is influenced by the effort one puts into an expected outcome or reward.

Goldman offers such examples as Ahab hunting down Moby Dick and standing in a long line for boba tea. The example, though, that takes center stage in his twice COE Award-winning article is one in which he pokes fun at himself.

“My glacial blue ’64 stick-shift Volvo station wagon had red, white, and blue Colorado U.S. Bicentennial plates and a phalanx of three small bowling trophies for hood ornaments,” he wrote. The “Bowlvo” was “falling apart like a piece of overcooked chicken,” and Goldman was willing to do anything to hold onto the car simply because he had invested so much time, emotion, and money into it. 

BREAKING DOWN BRAIN SCIENCE: Bruce Goldman, Senior Science Writer at Stanford University School of Medicine, shared a story about his ’64 Volvo station wagon to make a complex study relatable. HAVING FUN WITH RESEARCH: Deirdre Kelly, Editor-in-Chief of The York University Magazine, explains how migration patterns can be studied through the lens of pizza.

Credit: Bruce Goldman, The York University Magazine

It was this lighthearted approach that took readers along for the ride in understanding a scholarly brain science study published in Neuron. And, in the end, Goldman says he “hoped readers would see themselves in the story.”

While Goldman interjected humor into his feature, some science stories come ready-made with fun. 

When Deirdre Kelly, Editor-in-Chief of The York University Magazine (Toronto, Canada), heard about a young history scholar’s doctoral thesis that examines immigration patterns in two Great Lakes cities through the history of pizza, she knew she had to have a slice of that pie. 

“I was drawn to the quirky angle,” she says.

Kelly’s COE-winning “Slice and the City” makes use of a few well-placed pizza puns. The two cities in question are Toronto, Canada, and Buffalo, New York, U.S., and Kelly writes that “once upon a pepperoni, they had more than pizza in common.” 

In 1950, the two cities shared similar economies, population sizes, and percentages of Italian immigrants—who brought their pizza recipes with them.

The research study uses pizza, as Kelly explains in her article, “as a lens to explore the history of immigration, business, labour, urbanization, gender, culture, economics, consumption, and food” in the two cities.

“For a writer, a university is a place full of hidden gems,” says Kelly. “My job is to find them and share them with the public. That excites me, and I let that come through in my writing.”

Shining a Powerful Spotlight

It isn’t often that a press release wins a feature-writing award. But when Jacqueline Garget, Communications Manager, Research, at the University of Cambridge, U.K., wrote a release to promote a groundbreaking discovery in plant sciences, she did just that. 

With the intriguing headline “This deceptive daisy remixed its genes to make fake lady flies,” Garget’s article was used to announce a landmark study that would be published in the journal Current Biology on the same day as her release. 

Plant science researchers at her institution discovered how a South African daisy, Gorteria diffusa, makes fake lady flies on its petals to trick male flies into pollinating it. Just how the daisy makes such a complicated structure has baffled scientists for decades. 

Garget sets the stage with an imagined encounter: 

A male fly approaches a flower, lands on top of what he thinks is a female fly, and jiggles around.
He’s trying to mate, but it isn’t quite working.
He has another go.
Eventually he gives up and buzzes off, unsuccessful.
The plant, meanwhile, has got what it wanted: pollen.

She most likely had her readers at “jiggles,” and with their attention locked, Garget skillfully goes on to not only explain the discovery but also set it in a wider context and to explain its significance. 

For those wondering, here’s how the daisy does it, in Garget’s words: “Researchers have identified three sets of genes involved in building the fake fly on the daisy’s petals. The big surprise is that all three sets already have other functions in the plant: one moves iron around, one makes root hairs grow, and one controls when flowers are made.”

A “DECEPTIVE DAISY”: Jacqueline Garget, Communications Manager, Research, at the University of Cambridge, explains a plant sciences breakthrough in an engaging article.  

Credit: University of Cambridge

As an experienced science writer, who herself has worked in a laboratory setting, Garget understands the importance of measurable outcomes, and her daisy story had some doozies. The online article, presented interactively with illustrative photos, was, at the time the entry was submitted to COE, viewed over 1,600 times. The story was sent out as a press release to journalists, resulting in 86 pieces of coverage across the U.K., Australia, and the United States, reaching an estimated 83,530,687 readers. 

Media coverage is often a goal of university science writers. Fernandez’s dune restoration story opened the door to several interviews with news agencies, and the Los Angeles Times invited the lead researchers to write an op-ed, which was also published in other newspapers. Conner’s comprehensive galaxy story resulted in local newspaper and television coverage.

Garget says stories that make science accessible and relatable can also help spark students’ interest in not only attending your university but also in considering science as a course of study. 

“If we do our jobs well, we make it easier for faculty members to apply for grants, attract outside funding, speak at conferences, and navigate the media,” says Goldman, who notes the “Bowlvo” article helped “ignite the career trajectory” of the young researcher he profiled.  

“It all feeds into the larger goal of branding—how we are positioning our university as a place for cutting-edge research,” says Goldman. 

“And as much as I’m aware of all the benefits to Stanford Medicine, I sometimes feel like I’m doing this job just for me,” Goldman adds, again a bit of tongue-in-cheek. “I get to squeeze the brains of some of the smartest people in the world. It’s like I’m a perpetual graduate student. I can’t imagine a better job.”