On April 23, Anna Farro Henderson will give the talk "Communicating Science: Learnings from Politics and Public Art" for Norman D. Smith Lecture Series. She explores what it meant to research climate science while becoming a mother and how this journey ultimately led her into politics and public art.
While advising a U.S. Senator and a Governor, she had to relinquish traditional academic approaches to communicating science. She quickly realized that people do not live by science alone; they live by their stories. To engage the public in climate and environmental issues, she needed to help individuals and communities integrate science into their personal narratives. As she traveled to rural town halls and environmental summits, her life as an artist began to merge with her work in politics.
Henderson is a Canadian American scientist and writer, a fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, and an instructor at the Loft Literary Center. She was an environmental policy adviser to the Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton.
Following the lecture, she will be signing copies of her book, "Core Samples." Visit her website for more information.
This lecture is sponsored in partnership with the Community Climate Resilience Institute and Norman D. Smith Lecture Series. Norman D. Smith was a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at UNL and served as department chair from 1998 to 2004. For more than two decades, he led Nebraska Citizens for Science, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to advancing science literacy in the state.
