Introduction

Hello all and welcome.

I am currently a PhD student in applied physiology. I have both a Bachelors and Masters of Science in Exercise Science and I have been working in physiology labs for about 4 years.

Most of the research I’ve done in the past explores blood pressure and other measures of vascular function during exercise. My current, main research interest is sex differences in vascular physiology throughout the lifespan but I also have many other interests in general cardiovascular health and wellness.

In an effort to build a resume and explore future career options (potentially both within and outside of academia) I have decided to try my hand at scientific communication as a productive thing to do in my limited free time.

So this page will be dedicated to my attempts to read and essentially translate science into layman's terms. Hopefully this will help me improve my scientific communication skills and will help you — whoever is reading this — to better understand what is going on in the world of human physiology research.

I am very passionate about this as I believe everyone should have access to research, especially when that research is directly related to health and wellness.

This has been one of the many issues as a result of the pandemic. One of the first things I noticed during Spring of 2020 was how many people heard one shocking thing on the news that had been twisted from the original research, took it for truth and continued to spread this misinformation. My knee-jerk reaction to this was that the person should have gone back to the linked scientific paper and they would have seen the real truth. But, then it dawned on me — scientific writing is basically a second language. Even for myself, looking back, I remember being a senior undergraduate student barely able to read most papers. Even now, after 4 years of undergrad work in science and 2.5 years of grad work, it still takes me several reads of a tediously written paper to fully grasp the main ideas the authors are trying to convey.

So I believe scientific communication is important. There is no reason for us scientists to gatekeep our research. Of course, I don’t expect people to immediately change their health habits just based on the findings of one paper — and they shouldn’t until after years of other labs confirming the findings — but the media still exists. And the general media tends to take research and twist it to say the most shocking thing for clickbait. And for that reason, I believe everyone should have access to the truth.