Rashada Alexander Prepares the Next Generation of Science Policy Leaders
Since 1973, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (STPF) has brought thousands of scientists and engineers into the policy world. The fellowship is a very popular pathway into science policy, and AAAS fellows have featured in several episodes of our Science Policy IRL series.
In this episode, we talk with the STPF fellowship director, Rashada Alexander. After completing a chemistry PhD and postdoc, she applied for an STPF fellowship that placed her inside the National Institutes of Health, where she worked for 10 years.
Alexander talks to us about how her fellowship experience helped her look up from the lab bench and find meaning in her life. In particular, she found ways to build relationships, learn how to read a room, and navigate organizational structures—skills that are not always valued in scientific labs. She explains why scientists and engineers should apply for this transformational experience.
Resources
- Learn more about the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship.
- Applications are now open for the 2025–2026 STPF cohort. Apply by November 1.
- Want to hear more about how fellowships can help launch scientists into a career in policy? Listen to our episodes with Quinn Spadola (another AAAS fellow) and Zach Pirtle (a Presidential Management Fellow).
- Are you doing science policy? Take our survey!
Transcript
Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
If you are even the tiniest bit curious about science policy, you’ve probably heard about AAAS, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS’s Science and Technology Policy Fellowship is legendary. It’s how many scientists and engineers have moved from the research world to the policy world, and AAAS fellows have featured in several episodes of our Science Policy IRL series.
I’m Lisa Margonelli, Editor-in-Chief at Issues. In this episode, we’re going behind the scenes of the STPF Fellowship with the Fellowship Director, Rashada Alexander. She talks to us about how her fellowship experience helped her look up from the bench and find meaning in her life, and why you should apply for this transformative experience.
Rashada Alexander: Thank you so much. I’m excited to get to spend some time with you as well as the listeners. Hi, everybody out there.
Margonelli: Hi. So, we always start with this first question of how do you define science policy, but I want to start with something a little bit different this time. How do you define AAAS? It’s totally legendary in the science world, but is it an advocacy organization? Is it a news organization? Is it a membership organization? What is AAAS?
Alexander: AAAS is a lot of those things to many different people. So on the surface, we are a multidisciplinary scientific society. So you might have the Society for Neuroscience or you might have the American Psychological Association. We are looking across STEMM fields: science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine. So we’re looking across all of those. And the thing that we are most well known for is publishing the journal Science, which is one of the largest and most well-known and quite prestigious scientific journals in the game. And so we are often known for that, but there are a number of other things that AAAS does.
It is a membership-based organization, to your question, Lisa. There is also a way in which we keep our members informed and folks who come into our orbit informed, about what is happening on the federal R&D budget side with research and development. What is happening in terms of policy that could affect the research enterprise? So we are in ways news, in some ways, we are publishing, and we are programs, like the Science and Technology Policy Fellowships, like the AAAS Mass Media Fellowships, like the Scientific Responsibility and Justice Division. So we do a lot of things. I think we have a lot of hats that we wear. Is that helpful?
Margonelli: Yeah, that is. So let’s start with the usual question. How do you define science policy?
I think about what is the intersection between STEMM as I have known it and experienced it, and policy, and that’s what I think about when I think about science policy.
Alexander: There is a pretty typical definition that a lot of folks give which is there is science for policy, so scientific information, STEMM-related expertise that goes into and supports the making of policy and the implementation of it, and then there’s also policy for science. So how do we do stem-cell research? How do we think about the use of maybe what are potentially illegal drugs in the use of research to understand more about them? How do we do that? What is the policy for it?
The way that I think about it—it might be just as broad, but it resonates with me—is when I’m working, I think about what facet of the STEMM enterprise, be it research, be it workforce, be it education, be it clinical research, what facet of that could be useful in this work that I’m doing? So that might mean critical thinking skills that you are keen to develop when you’re in scientific technological training spaces. That might mean what is the newest advance that should affect how we implement this policy about groundwater management? What is our understanding about the workforce of folks that come out of the STEMM enterprise and where do they go and what do they do and how do they put that expertise to use? So I think about what is the intersection between STEMM as I have known it and experienced it, and policy, and that’s what I think about when I think about science policy: how are they just coming into contact with each other and needing to influence one the other?
Margonelli: You’re the director of AAAS’s Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. So what does a day in your life look like?
Alexander: Well, a day in my life looks like consistently thinking about the whole of the program. There are multiple facets of the program to think about, but I’m thinking about the whole of it. So to give you a sense of what does that mean, so we have somewhere between 150 to 200 new fellows every year, so people who are just now starting in the program, and that means that they are just now embarking on this fellowship journey where they are going to be embedded in the federal government for that full year. They are going to contribute their STEMM expertise to policymaking and implementation, and they’re also going to learn how policy can affect some of the work of the STEMM enterprise. We end up having about 300 fellows in every class and we have 4,000-plus alumni, like myself. I was once a fellow as well. So what does it mean for that whole mass of folks? And that’s not counting the agencies that we engage with.
They are going to contribute their STEMM expertise to policymaking and implementation, and they’re also going to learn how policy can affect some of the work of the STEMM enterprise.
Now, the day-to-day, what does that mean? That might mean getting to talk to you about the program. That might mean getting to go somewhere with some undergraduates or graduate students who are trying to figure out, as I once was, where are they going to go? What are they going to do? What’s it going to look like? It might mean engaging with some federal partners to see, okay, so what kind of expertise are you seeking? Right? We have a number of different folks that come in to us from different fields. What are you seeking? What are the next areas we need to be thinking about?
One of the things that we’re working on right now is getting ready for our second rapid-response cohort in artificial intelligence. AI is a huge space right now where we’re thinking about policy, about legislation, about implementation, about its impact day to day on our lives. And we saw an opportunity last fall to say, “Hey, this is happening right now in real time. Let’s be responsive and let’s put some additional expertise on Capitol Hill with legislators right now as they’re trying to grapple with these issues.” And so that is what we did, and we are doing it a second time. So we did it last fall, had six fellows placed. We are going to do it again this year, hoping to build upon that. What does that look like? How do you do that? You got to fundraise. You got to think about the placement opportunities. What kinds of offices could these folks work in? Helping them understand what the opportunity might be, doing all of that and supporting the people who do even more of the day-to-day, boots-on-the-ground work of that.
Margonelli: So you’re constantly figuring out how to innovate or change within this space and how to activate more stuff.
Alexander: Yes.
Margonelli: That’s really interesting. I read a quote from one of the early… I don’t know if he was really a founder of the S&T Policy Fellowship. His last name was Golden, and he said something like, “Good ideas are contagious,” back in 1973. And he said basically that he saw this all as a site for innovation, which I think is a really interesting twist for scientists who may see innovation happening in the lab, but this is a big space for social innovation.
This program does something unique in terms of supporting federal service. So about 40% to 50% of us who come through the program end up staying in the government.
Alexander: It is. It is. I think that might’ve been William T. Golden, who was a treasurer of AAAS at one point. I agree completely with that. When I came into the fellowship, I found it transformative, for myself as a human being and as a professional. One of the reasons why was because I got to experience that contagiousness of good ideas. I walked into a space where some of the abilities and skills that were not always appreciated during my graduate and postdoc work, like relationship-building, actually situational cognizance, learning to read a room, figuring out how you actually navigate organization structures, how you navigate the realities of people, those were not always appreciated in the lab, in research environments. And when I came into the fellowship, it was like, “Oh no, we’re all thinking about that. We’re all trying to figure out how to do things, how to be effective, how to take what we learned at the bench and give it meaning beyond that.”
And so those good ideas, that being contagious, it’s completely true, and I think that this program does something unique in terms of supporting federal service. So about 40% to 50% of us who come through the program end up staying in the government, be it local, regional, federal. That’s pretty significant to expose people to policy in that way, to expose them to the inner workings of something so significant of civic life and then have that passion ignited enough that a lot of them stay. That means something, and that energizes, I think, governments. Bringing in those different perspectives, it energizes it, and so we get to be a part of that.
Margonelli: I think it’s really interesting because that 40% to 50% of people who stay behind, those are people who’ve devoted many years to their higher education and many years to following a vision of biology or geology or chemistry or psychology, and now they’re switching to a very different stream. Let’s go back to you and your career to get a sense… This is the other question we always ask. What was your career path into science policy? So you started, I think, as a chemist.
Alexander: Yeah.
Margonelli: And how did you decide on chemistry?
Alexander: My high-school chemistry teacher, Mrs. Canipe, one day, I think it was 10th grade, she cut a big chunk of sodium off of the sodium that she kept in a jar in the classroom and she put it into a very large beaker of water. Now, for anybody who might’ve forgotten or doesn’t know, sodium in its just plain old state is very reactive with water. So it blew up, and I was hooked. I was like, “Whatever this is, I want in. I want in. You just blew up a big chunk of stuff in front of me. I want to know, how does that work? What was that? What went into it? How does that start?” And so that was the beginning of it for me, and then from there, I just kept enjoying learning about how the world around us operated beyond what we can see and how that influences what we can see. The idea of genotype to phenotype, right? There’s a way that the underlying changes, and now that changes what you see, so it was always fascinating to me.
Margonelli: And you are in Kentucky?
Alexander: No, Alabama. So I’m originally from Florence, Alabama, born in Birmingham. Florence is a small town in the northwest corner of Alabama, near Huntsville. It’s often something that people hear in the defense space, air and space. And so that’s where I was raised, and then I went to college at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Northeastern Ohio, always a good spot in my heart, and then I went to graduate school at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
Margonelli: Oh, okay. And what did you think you were going to do as a chemist?
Alexander: I did not know. I definitely wanted to keep learning, but I honestly did not know. I feel like a lot of the career evolution that I’ve experienced came because I was trying to learn more. I wanted to understand more. So I did not know exactly what I was going to do, and that’s actually why I ended up going into graduate school. I got towards the end of my undergraduate work and I was like, “I don’t know if I have enough knowledge to obtain a job that I will like doing each day more often than I do not.” I was like, “I don’t know if I do have the knowledge for that.” And I was like, “Well, how do you get more knowledge after undergraduate? Graduate school!” So that was where I went, and wanted to just keep learning about how I could enjoy science the most and contribute to it the most, I think.
Margonelli: So you saw it also as a community?
Alexander: Yeah. Yeah, because you think about it, you go into graduate school and when you first get there… you’re over the moon, idolizing your advisor and the professors in the department, and by the time you leave, the people that you’re often going to for advice and that you’re learning the most from are your peers. And it’s not that you disregard the advice from those folks who have gone before you in a different way, but you see it in a more comprehensive way and you build community and you build understanding from the people who are working right alongside you at the same level.
Margonelli: All right. That’s really an interesting thing. That’s an interesting aspect of science that a lot of times looking backwards, people don’t see that those communities are so important, because they focus on the hierarchy, which becomes super important in all the tenure and all the things that happen later on, but that community is super important.
Alexander: Well, very important, because you’re also developing your professional identity in a lot of ways, whether you realize it or not. You’re starting to learn about the lines, right? In a lab, you might be the person making all of the ordering decisions for the whole lab, managing radioactive safety for the whole lab, setting the protocols up for the whole lab, especially if your advisor is new, as new as you might be when you start out in graduate school. So you are starting to form this professional identity and this set of skills, but often nobody says that to you in graduate school, right? It’s not seen that way, but that is what you are developing. And I don’t know if I would’ve gotten through graduate school sane without some of the fellow graduate students and postdocs I worked with. I might’ve gotten out sane without my advisor.
I didn’t understand some of the nuances that you find when you step outside of the bench, meaning everything is not always determined by the science at hand.
Margonelli: (laughs) So how did you end up getting an S&T fellowship in 2009? What led you to apply?
Alexander: It was the same thing you asked me earlier, right? What did I think I was going to do? I started thinking about what I could do. What would it feel like? How would it look? And I applied in 2006, I think, for the Fellowship. 2005, 2006. And I did not get in, and then I was quite naïve in a number of ways. I did not know what science policy could be. I did not know what an opportunity like this would look, and I didn’t understand some of the nuances that you find when you step outside of the bench, meaning everything is not always determined by the science at hand. There are other decisions, other factors, other considerations. And it’s not quite like, “Oh, I’m going to work and become my advisor and then I’ll have the life they had and I’ll do the things they did.” That’s not how it works, nor should it be.
And so I started thinking about what else could I do, and that was how I found out about the fellowship the first time around. And then after it, I went and I did a second postdoc and I was happy about that, because I felt like if I was going to transition away from a bench-based career, I was going to do it no matter what and it would just be a matter of the timing. And so I wanted to do a postdoc, though, that allowed me to really focus on research in an environment that felt more supportive than my first postdoc had been. And so I went into a lab that was established, where I was very clear with folks up front, “Hey, I’m not going to become an academic researcher. That’s not what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m not doing that.” And they were very welcoming and appreciative of that clarity and that candor. I think sometimes when you feel less worried about the immediate stuff, you can think about the higher-level things.
So then I started going, “What do I want to do? What do I want to be engaged in?” And what I had been doing all along but didn’t realize was I clicked, I was smarter, stronger, faster, when I was doing more than just my research. So if I was involved with the Graduate Student Association, the Black Graduate Professional Student Association, the Postdoc Association, all those things, it enriched me in a particular way, including in the work I did. I was happier doing the work. I was a little more resilient in certain spaces, which in research is really important.
I realized I want to benefit science. I just know it’s not going to be at the bench. It’s not my ministry, so let me go and make that easier for somebody else.
So I started thinking, “Okay, well what does it look like for you to engage more in those spaces to benefit science?” And I realized I want to benefit science. I just know it’s not going to be at the bench. It’s not my ministry, so let me go and make that easier for somebody else. And so that was how I started to think about what else could I do, and then at the same time, I started thinking about policy more. How does an institution decide what kind of benefits its postdocs do or don’t get? How is it decided that as a training grant recipient, I can’t set up an individual retirement account? Well, I can’t, because my income’s not taxable, so it’s not considered income that I can do that with. Who decides that? Where does that sit? What does that look like? And so that led me to just trying to figure out how those pieces come together, and so that was, I think, what seeded my path into policy.
Margonelli: Wow. I think it’s really interesting that you saw this as your ministry.
Alexander: I didn’t think about the language I was using until you said that, Lisa. Yeah, let’s go with it. Let’s go with it.
Margonelli: Yeah. So tell me about the ministry.
Alexander: I like to do multiple things in service of something. Throughout my career, people have often been like, “Don’t you just want to do one thing?” And I’m like, “No.” Who wants to do one thing? I want to do multiple things. I want to do them in service of something, preferably bigger than me, but I want to do multiple things, and I like being able to turn on a dime. And there are more places in the world that benefit from people who can talk across boundaries and who can talk across orgs and silos and sectors, because I don’t think we struggle because there’s not enough smart people. I think sometimes smart people, we don’t always know how to talk to each other and we don’t always know how to share information in ways. Sometimes our systems don’t facilitate that. So I think I’ve always liked the idea of making things better, and making things better seemed more likely if I expanded the impact that I had. So I guess maybe that’s my ministry. Maybe.
Margonelli: And so let’s talk a little bit about what happened when you got the S&T policy fellowship. You ended up at the NIH Office of Extramural Research, which also is a place that in some ways set some of that policy about the experience of grad students and postdocs all across the country at a big meta level. Did you get to choose the NIH or were you assigned to that office?
We work very hard to ensure whatever the funding source, whatever the fellowship is, that folks are not told what they’re going to work on. That is not touched. They get to decide that.
Alexander: So I got to choose it. A little bit of background about the S&T policy fellowship. STPF is our acronym for it. We have a very strong free-agency principle, so when fellows come into the program, we give them as much information as possible so that they can make the most informed choice for themselves. We work very hard to ensure whatever the funding source, whatever the fellowship is, that folks are not told what they’re going to work on. That is not touched. They get to decide that. We do finalist interview week, so we bring folks into the DC area so that they can be here for about a week, they can go to interviews at the different agencies that they might actually place at, they can engage with those folks, and see where they might want to be.
And so I did that. I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go at the time. We encourage people in their candidate statements for the program to talk about where they could see themselves potentially working, because it helps us to understand how they’re thinking about this opportunity. And so I knew that the National Institutes of Health was the one I’d gotten funding from already as a graduate student postdoc, and then I thought, “Well, wouldn’t it be interesting to see what those policies look like?”
So when I went in to talk with… It was Della Han who was my mentor during the Fellowship, and she’s still someone that I try to keep in touch with. I sat down with her and I asked her, why did she want to consider me for a placement spot there? Because I like to know why do you want to talk to me? What is it I did? Especially if it’s good, because then I can do it twice. So she started talking to me and I talked about some of the same things I just mentioned to you with regard to my ministry: what I really like to do, what jazzes me up.
It was transformative. It also punched me in the face a couple of times. It was not always fun, but it was always a pleasure.
And she was like, “Exactly that, Rashada. We are the office.” Because the Office of External Research sets the policy and implements policy and figures out, how is this thing that came through legislation or came through an HHS—Department of Health and Human Services—mandate or something broader that came from the Office of Science and Technology policy, how do you actually operationalize that? How do you make it a real thing? And that is a lot of problem solving. That’s relationship building. That’s critical thinking, for sure. And it’s also a little reactive. All those things really moved me. I liked the idea that I was having to adapt to things and I was having to figure stuff out. And so I got all of that and more. I loved that fellowship. I loved that experience. It was transformative. It also punched me in the face a couple of times. It was not always fun, but it was always a pleasure. Does that make sense?
Margonelli: It does, and transformative things are not always the nicest thing to experience at the time.
Alexander: Man, they are not.
Margonelli: So what do you mean when you say sometimes it punched you in the face?
Alexander: I had to learn some things. One of the biggest lessons I learned was know your audience. Read the room. I remember giving a presentation, and I had been informed that I needed to do it, but I think there was important context that was not shared with me as more of a newbie to the federal government, because every agency also has its own history.
If you don’t know much about the National Institutes of Health, NIH, let me tell you. There are 27 different institutes and centers, and we call those ICs. People often refer to them as ICs, institutes and centers, and every single one of them has its own culture. So if somebody’s told you that they know about one NIH IC, they know about one NIH IC. 27 different fiefdoms, all with their own rules. They were established at different times in history, different contexts. So they have their own way of doing things. If you’re going to operate effectively at NIH, you better know that. I had some learning to do. And so I went into that meeting and those people ate my face, Lisa. They ate it right off. And well they should have, because I needed to know that in order to be successful and in order to give them the information that they needed to be a part of solutions.
Sometimes you go into a space and people aren’t going to like what you say. That’s just life. But think about how you’re presenting it to them, who you’re presenting it to, so that when you walk out of the room, you still added some value, even if the value is just knowing, yeah, these people don’t like that and this is the conversation we had. Even that is valuable, because you may not have known it when you came in the room, but that doesn’t mean that being in the room is going to be pleasant.
Sometimes it’s not just how you mess up or that you mess up; it’s how you recover on the other side. Sometimes people will remember that more than the mess-up.
So they asked me all kinds of questions that I had no answer for, and I was just like, “I didn’t know this was going to happen.” And when I left it, I’ll be really candid, I went back to my desk and I cried. Oh, I cried. My little face was so sad. But, I knew I had to go back into my fellowship work and I had to work with some of those same people. I had to figure out how to recover. Hence, resilience. That was really important to understand, because sometimes it’s not just how you mess up or that you mess up; it’s how you recover on the other side. Sometimes people will remember that more than the mess-up. So that was a really good lesson for me, and sometimes you’re going to take some licks. That’s just life. You’re going to be the bearer of bad news.
Margonelli: I think that’s such an interesting lesson about science policy, about leaving the bench, because you might not realize that the bench itself is a culture. You think that it’s, I don’t know, access to truth or something, sometimes. That’s one of the myths. And then each agency has its own culture. Each branch of government has its own culture. The world has many, many cultures, and you’re pulling all of these things together and you’re also connecting one culture to another. So when you went into that IC, you were connecting it to whatever other thing.
It’s so interesting. I mean, at Issues, we have scientists and we have policy people writing and trying to communicate across discipline with each other, but we also have that policymakers talk about things in a completely different way. They’re very emotional, down to earth, in a way that sometimes scientists come to us with a five-point plan and we’re like, “Well, you got to have these people in it because the people are who the policy-makers respond to.” And so it’s this whole interesting, fascinating process of translation and meaning-making. What you said about the ministry really resonates with me.
Alexander: Yes. The way you’ve laid that out is so eloquent. Thank you for that. I think that opportunities like STPF… because it is not the only one, it is one of the most well known, but it’s not the only one. Anything that, as my boss puts it, gets you to look up from the bench so you begin to think about, “How does what I did relate to other places? Who will care? Why will they care? What will it mean to them?” I think is so powerful because just realizing that you have to look up from it, right? Like you said, we don’t realize that the culture of research, it is a culture. It certainly is. And one of the best things that came from this program and from these kinds of opportunities for me was that chance to then look at the bigger picture and understand where I fit in it. And I’ll tell you, it has benefited me in multiple ways outside of my life.
One of the best things that came from this program and from these kinds of opportunities for me was that chance to then look at the bigger picture and understand where I fit in it. And I’ll tell you, it has benefited me in multiple ways outside of my life.
One of the things—I don’t know if this is appropriate, but I’ll tell you—my baby brother died last year unexpectedly. I’ve thought a lot about how can I honor him? How can I keep loving him? Which seems quite separate from science policy, but I’ve been thinking about could I set up a foundation for him? Could I think about something that is important? Some way I wanted to support him or love him or enable his excellence that I didn’t get to do that I could do for somebody else. And part of me thinking about that involves the knowledge I learned from this fellowship and this work now.
If you want to have a program that helps people, that does something in a community, where do you go to do that? Well, you want to look at the local and municipal government. You want to have conversations. You want to see what other initiatives are they doing that you can build upon? You want to think about who could be early adopters, supporters, ambassadors of what you’re doing. Are there other places where there’s already something like what you want to do? You don’t need to start something new. You can build on it. These are all lessons, smart lessons, in the science policy ecosystem that I don’t know if I would’ve had had I not come through something like this.
Margonelli: That’s very moving. Thank you for that, and I think what you’re speaking to is that science policy can be… it sounds like a very technical thing, science policy, and what I tell people I edit this science policy magazine, it sounds, wow, really technical, because science and policy are both highly technical words, but it can be deeply, deeply personal and satisfying and a way to connect to the world and make it a better place.
Alexander: Especially when you’re in the midst of things like election years, pandemics, environmental disasters, ever-going climate shifts. I think of it as connecting the expertise to action. We have the expertise. There’s action that we need to take. How do we connect those things? How do we enable it? I’m really happy to be in a space where I feel like I can do that and I can be contributing in some strong ways and enabling others to do something similar.
Margonelli: So I want to just ask you about what it was like to work for a foundation. You worked for the NIH as a fellow, and then you became an employee of the NIH, and you were there for some time, and then you made a decision to go off and, I think, work for a foundation. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was like and the opportunities in that other mode?
Alexander: Yeah. So I had been at NIH, probably I was getting close to eight, nine years, and I liked the work. The last position I had was as a program director in the National Institute of General Medical Sciences where I got to work on programs that build research capacity and infrastructure in those places that don’t get a lot of NIH money, so often places that are unfortunately called flyover states like Nebraska, Oklahoma, the Dakotas. I got to make sure that people in Montana and Mississippi got to do really strong research just like folks in California and Boston. That’s the way I thought about it, and that was good work. I enjoyed that.
I got the question about, “Don’t you want to just do one thing?” I started to get that more, and I realized I wanted to be creative in different ways. Subject matter expertise is often the currency of certain spaces, and I was just like, “I don’t want to do that.” And I started thinking, “Well, what if I left the federal government?” Scary thing. My mom was freaked out. She did not like that. She was like, “Don’t you leave that good government job.”
All of the things that are facing us, these challenges, the federal government can’t solve them all. We need to be working with folks in other sectors. How can we do that? How do they solve problems?
But I started thinking about what if somebody with my insight into the federal government left and worked in another sector? Because I could bring some of that. I could make connections to folks in government and also all of the things that are facing us, these challenges, the federal government can’t solve them all. We need to be working with folks in other sectors. How can we do that? How do they solve problems? I had all these questions and thinkings about it.
And so I found out about a position through actually the fellows network, the alumni network, at the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. People call it F-F-A-R, but most of the people who work there just call it FFAR. And it was founded in the 2014 Farm Bill as a complement to the US Department of Agriculture, USDA, the folks who inspect our food and look at our food and figure out how we’re going to feed all these people. A complement to them in developing public-private partnerships.
And so I was interested for a couple of reasons. One, it was connected still to the federal government, but it was a nonprofit. Two, FFAR has a really cool model where in order for them to use any dollar that they have, to spend one dollar, it has to be matched by a non-federal dollar, which means that before you even begin, you have to make sure people care about what you’re doing. You have to have people engaged as partners, which is a really cool thing and a little bit different, I think, from a lot of research where you just do it and then later you’re like, “Oh, nobody cared about that. Whoopsie.” In this case, you had to care right up front, and I liked that and I liked the potential impact that that could make.
So I said, “Well, let’s try it,” and I interviewed for a position there and was fortunate enough to get hired on, and that was really cool because it was a small organization, so less than 50 folks, and as my friend put it, “If you want to wear a hat, you can be the sheriff.” And that’s a cool space to be in, because I wanted to be more creative. I wanted to be able to flip around and try different stuff, and I could do that there. I got to get an HR function established, which is important for any organization, science-based or otherwise, because you got to deal with your people. I got to put out the first ever impact report for the organization to talk about what it was doing and its real value proposition. That was really cool. So it was awesome.
Margonelli: That’s great. So you’ve come to AAAS and you bring an intimate knowledge of what it’s like to have grown up in a flyover state, as you say. You bring a knowledge of what it’s like to live in the body of a Black woman.
Alexander: Yes.
Margonelli: You bring all this embedded lived knowledge. You know what it’s like to work at NIH. You know what it’s like to be outside of the government. You know what it’s like to be at a public-private foundation. And so where are you seeing opportunities to develop the vision of the AAAS S&T Policy Fellowship?
Alexander: I think about it, I guess, three phases. So we celebrated our 50th anniversary last year. I’m thinking about what are we going to be talking about at the 60th anniversary? What’s going to be next? The 70th. The 80th. So this program’s been in existence for fifty-plus years now. There’s a lot of knowledge that we have about the training space, how it can be optimized, the kinds of skills that folks come out having, as well as the kinds of things that it’s useful for folks to be learning about and thinking about in their matriculation. And so I’m really thinking about how can STPF and the lessons it has learned, how can that be imparted towards the training space, towards the development space, before people get to the fellowship? What could that look like? So that’s one space.
Then I’m thinking about what happens post-fellowship. We have 4,000-plus alums. A lot of passion and commitment around public service, around using STEMM to make things better, using that expertise and those skills that we get to make the world better. So then how do we activate that? And so we are doing a lot of engagement with our alumni and thinking about what is useful to y’all after your fellowships. Are there opportunities for you to maybe come back into the federal government and bring a heightened level of expertise and insight? Are there spaces where we can be facilitating connections that have nothing to do with our specific programs but that we are uniquely situated to do? So I’m thinking about it. What can we give back and how can we pave the way forward?
And then the third place is right there in the middle. We have a core fellowship every year that ends up putting a lot of people in the federal government, and the AI cohort is an example. So I talked about us launching that rapid-response cohort. Part of what that has done for us, which I’m really excited about, is we’re not going to have rapid-response cohorts in a particular subject everywhere. It doesn’t make sense, because at some point, it’s not rapid, but what we can do during that time is almost use it as a wedge to expand our understanding and that of the core fellowship and alumni as well, and so we’ve been doing that with some very targeted artificial intelligence-relevant programming around policy, equity, around the tools that we use. We’re actually looking to facilitate movement, useful connections.
I think that we talk about AI and it started to become like talking about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency where everybody says a word, but nobody knows what it means until somebody gets in trouble. And then we go, “Oh my goodness, it’s that.” And so I want us to move into a space where we see this tool, the sets of capabilities for what they can bring to us, we work intentionally with them, and we are also resilient in how we think about them, planning for potential failures, planning for challenges. How can we do that without freaking ourselves out so much that we don’t do anything?
How can we do that without freaking ourselves out so much that we don’t do anything?
I’m really interested in that, and so this AI cohort has allowed us to really think about that for the broader core cohort. What kind of programming can we put in front of them so that they don’t say, “Oh, that’s not my thing,” but they start to say, “Oh, this is where I need to be thinking about it. This might be the opportunity, this might be the risk.” So that is a space where I really keep looking at how can we keep optimizing that core cohort? How can we keep ensuring that they are as well set up for public service as possible?
Another thing right now is human beings. We come out of this pandemic. We got all this stuff in our little hearts. We’re all lonely and freaked out, and everything’s different, and that affects how you engage with other people. We’re putting all these people in the federal government. The federal government’s not always an easy place to be in, but it is a place where resilience and mindfulness is particularly powerful. How do we give them those skills too, in addition to some of the technical pieces? How do we ensure that we’re putting reasonable human beings in these spaces who are willing to act reasonable with other human beings? It’s all a part of that. So I’m thinking in those three buckets.
Margonelli: That’s really interesting. We’ve gotten a really strong sense of the questions that motivate you to do this work. That’s normally our last question here, so I just want to ask you a different question, which is when people listen to this, if anyone could possibly listen to this conversation and still be on the fence about applying, what’s your last guiding words in thinking about the application? You applied more than once, so resilience in application is important.
Alexander: Definitely.
Margonelli: And not feeling that it’s a system for rejection; it is a system for deeper understanding and engagement. So tell us a little bit about that in light of the application process.
Alexander: First off, when you apply for this program, it becomes really clear, and if it isn’t already to you, let me make it clear to you. This is not a research position. So you need to think about the things you’ve done beyond your research, and that alone can be so useful. I used to do chemistry demos for kids at public libraries and schools and stuff, and I never thought about that as science communication, but it totally is. You’re explaining what’s happening. You’re helping them understand a scientific phenomenon in this space and maybe igniting some curiosity. That’s a big part of science communication, and sometimes you can forget what you’ve done. And so a process like this, be it this or be it any other program, can help you remember what else you’ve done and what else energized you. I think a lot of times figuring out what makes you tick, what kind of things do you like doing, will often give you insight.
It’s also a place where you really learn the value of the saying, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” There is much to do. There is much to be approached, much that challenges us. Perfection is never really an option.
So I think the process itself is going to grow you. If you want to be challenged, if you want to grow, if you want to be sharpened… I think of iron sharpens iron. If you want that, this is a heck of a place to come. You want to do something interesting and challenging, this is a heck of a place to be, and it’s also a place where you really learn the value of the saying, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” There is much to do. There is much to be approached, much that challenges us. Perfection is never really an option.
You think about perfection, it’s always a subjective term, right? What’s perfect? Well, what’s the purpose, right? This is a space that made me really think about something being fit for purpose. Can it be fit for what you need? Is it good enough for what you need? Can it move us forward? If I do this today, even if it’s hard and not what I want, will it set the stage for something better later? Often, the answer is yes, and this program, I think, helped understand the value of that, because that is building resilience too.
Margonelli: Thank you so much.
Alexander: Thank you.
Margonelli: This was just a really great conversation, not just about this fellowship, but about creating meaning in your life.
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Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcast. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach, and our audio engineer, Shannon Lynch. I’m Lisa Margonelli, Editor-in-Chief at Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for listening.