Jory Weintraub, PhD

BIRC Director

Jory is the founding director of Duke’s Broader Impacts Resource Center (BIRC) and a Steering Committee member for the National Alliance of Broader Impacts (NABI).  He received his BS in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from UC San Diego and his PhD in Immunology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in STEM Education, with a focus on outreach to underrepresented minority students, and then spent several years teaching undergraduate biology and running minority outreach programs.

In 2005 he joined the newly-funded National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), where he developed and ran local, national and international evolutionary biology outreach activities for students, teachers and the general public.  When NESCent’s funding concluded in 2015, he began his current position as the Science Communication Director and Senior Lecturing Fellow with the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in science communication and running science communication workshops for Duke faculty and postdocs.

In addition to serving as a NABI Steering Committee member, he is on the Board of Directors of the Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC), the Advisory Board for the Triangle Center for Evolutionary Medicine (TriCEM) and the Editorial Board of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach.  His work focuses on broader impacts practice/policy, minority outreach in STEM, science communication/outreach/education and faculty development.

Esko Brummel

BIRC Intern

While advocating for investment in research, scientists need a means to communicate why their work deserves to be funded and how their discoveries benefit society. Policymakers and the citizens, on the other hand, need to interpret these claims to inform their choice of policy while advocating what they think is ethical and worthwhile. Whether in Washington, D.C. or Washington County in rural North Carolina, robust science communication is crucial to facilitating this relationship though it is unclear whether the necessary training and Science Communication infrastructure is uniformly available. As a part of BIRC, Esko is joining others to narrow this gap by assisting Duke faculty as they craft their Broader Impacts for NSF grants and include the community in their projects.

Esko joins the Broader Impacts Resource Center as a Masters student in Bioethics and Science Policy within Duke’s Initiative for Science and Society. Prior to Duke, Esko served as a community organizer in Southwest Baltimore through AmeriCorps VISTA as well as a legislative assistant in the Maryland House of Delegates. At Duke and beyond BIRC, Esko is learning more ways to improve communication within the science community as a part of the Vice-provost of Research’s Visualizing Scholarship Networks Team and the Bass Connections Anti-Polarization working group. He is also contributor to Duke’s SciPol policy tracking site and the Science Communicators of North Carolina.