The Slack channel didn’t start as a movement — it began as a space where about 50 doctoral students talked through policy headlines and the growing threats mounting against science in the public sphere.
Many of them convened in person last year at the 2025 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. In hallway conversations, they grappled with news stories, including mass firings at the National Institutes of Health.
“There was tenseness in the air,” said Miles Arnett, a fourth-year doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. “We knew big things were happening, and we wanted to pool our efforts and see if we could put our heads together to do something bigger.”
That sense of urgency sparked action, turning conversations into collaboration among more than 30 university science policy groups connected by word of mouth.
Over the next year, more than 200 individuals joined the Slack channel, transforming a casual chatroom into the foundation of the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), a formalized effort to mobilize young scientists as policy defenders.
This year, SNAP will return to its roots at the 2026 AAAS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, hosting a reception aimed at recruiting more early-career researchers. The group will also present a plenary panel session that same day about some of its advocacy efforts.
One of those projects — initiated by the Cornell Advancing Science and Policy Club — encouraged scientists to write op-eds in their hometown newspapers emphasizing the importance of science funding.
This initiative is known as the McClintock Letters, named for Barbara McClintock, the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Her discovery of mobile genetic elements — now considered fundamental to biology — was initially dismissed by much of the scientific community.
The McClintock Letters saw more than 200 op-eds published in 44 states around the country. Among the writers was Erin Morrow, a co-organizer of SNAP and fourth-year doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In the Georgia-based Marietta Daily Journal, she opened up about how scientific innovation — more specifically, a pacemaker — saved her life from a heart condition.
“A lot of us were inspired to pursue science in the first place by our communities,” Morrow said. “Maybe we had a really great high school science teacher or went to a local science center. We wanted to bring those experiences to the forefront and put names to [the] faces of people doing science in the United States.”
To Arnett, a founding member of SNAP, seeing his name in the Massachusetts-based Worcester Telegram & Gazette seemed surreal — something his science education hadn’t prepared him for.
“This was out of reach for most of my life. It was where other people wrote about more important things,” he said. “We came from these communities. If we could speak directly to the people we grew up around, hopefully it would build understanding on both sides.”
For the bioengineering student, the effort felt urgent after COVID-19, when vaccine misinformation highlighted the need for scientists to explain research clearly.
“Efforts to communicate that incredible science were not promoting trust — and were in many cases doing the opposite,” Arnett said. “I think a lot of people came out of the pandemic with much less faith in science than they had when they went into it.”
A more recent example is public confusion surrounding GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic, where conflicting reports have left many people unsure whether the weight loss drugs are safe for them.
“A lot of the public doesn’t know how it works and are seeking it,” said Alex Rich, a fifth-year neuroscience doctoral candidate at Yale University. “Scientists still don’t know a lot, like long-term implications or potential exacerbation of disordered eating, and we need to be able to admit we don’t know a lot. The absence of that humility feels reminiscent of COVID-19.”
Rich studies how people make decisions about food, especially as it relates to obesity and binge eating. As a co-organizer, she will join Arnett and Morrow in speaking about SNAP at the Annual Meeting.
SNAP doesn’t have officers or official positions of leadership. The horizontal structure, Rich said, allows people to engage as they have bandwidth.
And there’s plenty to do. To build the next generation of advocates, SNAP is developing an open-access SciPol 101 course to introduce policy and communication skills. The group is also planning a hackathon-style challenge, inviting students to design policy solutions to challenges in the scientific ecosystem.
Putting those skills in practice, the group is also recruiting help for a new project, Stance on Science, which aims to host town halls and publish responses to science policy-oriented questionnaires from midterm election candidates across the country.
“It’s still tense, and there’s a lot to be done,” said Rich. “There’s a lot of despair but also opportunity at this moment. To be among like-minded people thinking about that this year is really exciting. I’m looking forward to it.”