In Fall 2020 Sarah Demers and Bonnie Fleming created PHYS 320, Science and Public Policy, as a new advanced elective course. Conceived during the pandemic, the course was taught remotely and was designed to fulfill a writing requirement.
Course description from the syllabus: Science is driven by innovation and discovery yet subject to the constraints of government, the public, and policy. This lecture course is designed to give students an overview of US Science and Public policy. Topics to be explored include the players in crafting science policy in Congress, at the state level, in industry, in academia, and the public. We will also explore how science is funded, big science, climate science, and globalization as well as Science and National Defense. Students will gain an appreciation of the relationship between government, industry, academia, and science policy. Focus on timely issues is a hallmark of this course including Diversity and Inclusion in Science, and the COVID19 global pandemic.
Now, five years later, Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago, John B. Madden Dean of Berkeley College and Lecturer in physic, has developed PHYS 3200, Physics and Public Policy, which builds upon the theme of the previous course concentrating on the physical sciences. Cruvinel received her B.S. from Yale in 2017 where she was a Physics (Intensive) major and worked with Prof. David DeMille, now a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, for her senior project. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University, where she researched astronomical instrumentation with the support from a NASA fellowship. During her doctoral studies, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the Physicists’ Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction and received the American Physical Society Five Sigma Physicist prize for outstanding advocacy. After Columbia, Dr. Cruvinel Santiago spent one year as a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation studying how to reduce the risk of nuclear weaponization of dual-purpose scientific research.
PHYS 3200 Course description from the syllabus: Science is driven by innovation and discovery yet subject to the constraints of government, the public, and policy. This lecture course is designed to give students an overview of how the physical sciences and policy intersect. Topics to be explored include the players in crafting science policy in Congress, at the state level, in industry, in academia, and the public. While most case studies will center around US policymaking, we will also cover a few global policy topics. Ultimately, we hope this course will give students the tools to understand how science policy works broadly, whether they want to work on it as an insider or to be citizen advocates.
On PHYS 3200, Cruvinel commented, “I’m hoping that the students will develop skills to become effective science policy advocates, whether they end up working in policymaking itself or if they go on to pursue scientific research as a career. To that end, I changed the course to have a more diverse set of writing assignments and simulations. While the more policy-focused students will learn from writing memos directed at government officials (as the course required in 2020), others will maybe benefit more from learning how to write lobbying one-pagers, how to take advocacy meetings with congressional staff and how to write op-eds to influence public opinion on science issues. We also have a few non-majors signed up for the course who might have some policy but no physics background. I hope they will take advantage of the more technical lectures on physics topics that impact current policy issues. While I chose the same textbook from 2020, the political and science landscapes have changed significantly in the last 5 years (and especially since the book was published in 2008), so more than half of the lectures now rely on more up-to-date reading material. Because of my background in astrophysics and nuclear security, a lot of the examples I’m bringing to the lectures are related to space and nuclear policy. It’s been a very fun experience to put this course together, since I’m pulling both from my physics training when we talk about, for example, large experiments, quantum information and nuclear science, and from my lived experience in policy research and advocacy. Overall, when I’m putting course materials together, I think of what I wish someone had taught me when I was myself a physics major at Yale before I went on to pursue scholarship in both physics and policy. “