Inform & Influence 51 Guest Writer: Oh, SNAP! Getting Early-Career Scientists to Engage with Policy and Community.

Hello newsletter readers,

Exciting news! While I am off on my trip to Southern Africa, I asked several organizations to talk about their activities in science and technology policy through my newsletter. I'm sure you'll find them interesting and informative!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments and I'll read them when I get back.

Debbie

Guest Post:

Oh, SNAP! Getting Early-Career Scientists to Engage with Policy and Community

In April 2025, the scientific community was facing extraordinary and unprecedented threats in the United States. The Trump administration had begun cutting research grants, the U.S. had pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, federal scientists had been arbitrarily terminated, and attacks were being leveled against universities. To push back against these threats and shake off the feeling of helplessness that pervaded science, a group of graduate students and early-career scientists began a Slack workspace that turned into some Zoom calls that turned into the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP). SNAP has now grown to more than 150 active members representing over 20 science policy groups around the country. Since April, SNAP has organized nationwide initiatives that have galvanized early-career scientists—graduate students, postdocs, and new faculty—to speak out and engage with policymakers.

If we have learned anything from the beginning of SNAP, it is that there is an abundance of early-career scientists eager to connect science, communities, and policymakers. Cultivating the information, resources, and organization necessary for large-scale projects is a challenge that can be overcome. To help others build their own push towards progress, we present here a record of SNAP’s first six months of existence. If you are interested in hearing more about our ongoing efforts, you can fill out our interest form to join our newsletter and get involved.

The McClintock Letters

As policy decisions affect research across the country, public opinion is being shaped by the stories that Americans hear about science and scientists. To help rebuild trust between scientists and the communities that raised them, SNAP launched its first major initiative: the McClintock Letters campaign. Inspired by Nobel Laureate Dr. Barbara McClintock’s birthday, we encouraged early-career researchers to publish op-eds in their hometown newspapers on or around June 16th, reframing science as locally relevant and scientists as neighbors and community members.

SNAP organizers reached out to hundreds of universities, scientific societies, research institutions, and peers to garner interest and mobilize scientists to participate in this campaign. Nationwide training opportunities attended by hundreds of scientists were held at universities and over Zoom, covering how to write an effective editorial essay, how to clearly convey one’s research to a general audience, and how to contact an editor for publication. These efforts helped demystify a method of public communication that is woefully underdiscussed in scientific training, preparing hundreds of first-time science communicators to participate in public discourse. 

Perhaps the most important logistical move SNAP made was creating a Slack channel specifically for McClintock Letter writers to ask questions and get feedback. Over a hundred channel members volunteered their time to edit each other’s pieces and celebrate each new publication. The team behind Science Homecoming, a similar initiative, also provided free editing services. This support system allowed writers to navigate the challenges of the process more easily.

To date, over 200 McClintock Letters have been published in at least 45 U.S. states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. An open letter calling to preserve the future of American science, authored by SNAP as a national companion piece to the local McClintock Letters, garnered over 1200 signatures from early-career scientists nationwide. While publications were in full swing, media-trained SNAP members contacted national media organizations to bring attention to these articles, resulting in features in the New York Times and Forbes, among others. 

The end results of all this? Young scientists ventured beyond their comfort zones to acquire invaluable skills in public-facing science communication. Equally important, millions of Americans opened their local papers to read about the impact of science in their communities and the human stories of their neighbors who drive scientific progress. All of SNAP’s McClintock Letters resources remain open access, and pieces continue to be published under this initiative.

Congressional District Visits

Building on the momentum from the McClintock Letters, SNAP’s Congressional District Visits initiative was designed to help early-career scientists meet with their Members of Congress during the August recess. In total, SNAP organized 54 visits across 29 red, blue, and purple states. While science advocacy is usually portrayed as requiring fly-ins and “Hill Days” in Washington, D.C., these district visits to hometown offices lowered barriers to participation, built local connections, and emphasized that science is a vital part of the health, economy, and innovation of every congressional district.

Participant recruitment was accomplished through word-of-mouth and by maintaining communication with McClintock letter writers and signees to the open letter mentioned above. In August, participants joined a Congressional Visits 101 training session on Zoom co-led by SNAP and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 144 participants formed groups according to their constituencies. More than 60% of meetings were held virtually to maximize accessibility, though in one case, scientists led a tour through a neuroimaging facility, giving policymakers firsthand insight into the lab spaces where federally funded research unfolds.

Each group entered meetings with a clear set of policy asks: sustained federal science funding to support discovery, education, and innovation, and a stop to destabilizing activities that threaten the continuity of research and the well-being of scientists. To ensure local resonance, a passionate team of SNAP members prepared district-specific one-pagers (e.g., TX-36, WA-7), which highlighted the scale of federal research investment in each state and sourced testimonials from locally published McClintock Letters.

These visits invited early-career scientists to see themselves as constituents and community representatives. By directly engaging with lawmakers and building relationships at their district offices, SNAP members helped reframe science as a shared, bipartisan vested interest tied to local economies and everyday lives.

Stance on Science

SNAP’s next major initiative, Stance on Science, represents a combination of the community engagement of the McClintock Letters and the direct policy engagement of the District Visits. SNAP is forming teams in every state and reaching out to candidates who are running for federal, state, and local office in the 2026 midterm elections to ask them questions about science policy issues that are relevant in the areas they seek to represent. These questions are designed through the lens of early-career scientists. Responses will largely be collected through email correspondence with Stance volunteers, though we will also be organizing town halls where community members can ask candidates directly about the science policy topics they care most about. Candidate responses will be hosted on SNAP’s website and disseminated via social media and traditional media where possible. Through this initiative, SNAP aims to provide the public with trusted, non-partisan information regarding their candidates’ stances on key science policy issues and emphasize to voters how the midterms can impact science in their communities. We are accelerating the organization of this initiative as we get closer to 2026, so please sign up here to get involved.

What’s Next for SNAP?

While the Stance on Science initiative will hold some of the spotlight during this coming year through the 2026 midterms, SNAP is far from done with developing new opportunities for engagement! We plan to hold our inaugural nationwide Science Policy Hackathon in Spring 2026, where small teams from science policy groups across the country will work towards answering some of the most challenging policy questions of today. SNAP is also providing support for starting new science policy groups and getting them actively involved in ongoing initiatives. Related to this, SNAP is developing a comprehensive science policy curriculum to train early-career scientists in policy engagement and organization.

For those interested in joining these efforts, there are a number of ways to get involved! For those at a university, contact your science policy group and ask if they are a member organization of SNAP. For everyone interested in SNAP’s ongoing initiatives, events, and publications, fill out this interest form to join our newsletter. Finally, for those early-career scientists who want to join SNAP and build a movement that engages researchers across the country, you can use the same interest form to be added to our organizer community and get involved!

Contributor LinkedIn Accounts

SNAP Coalition LinkedIn

Contributing authors:

Brendon Davis, Isako Di Tomassi, Emma Scales, Erin Morrow, Alex Rich, Miles Arnett, Alex Lando, Kassandra Fernandez

Contributing groups:

Science Policy and Diplomacy Group at Johns Hopkins (JHSPDG), Science Policy Group at UCLA (UCLA SPG), Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group (PSPDG), Cornell Advancing Science and Policy Club (ASAP), Promoting Policy Advocacy in Science and Engineering at the University of Florida (Gator PASE)

THANK YOU for reading!

I am Dr. Deborah D. Stine, the founder of the Science & Technology (S&T) Policy Academy, which offers workshops for organizations, “done for you” program evaluation and policy analysis, major proposal strategy development, as well as career, leadership, and new business coaching services.

I spent over 30 years in Washington DC, working for the Obama White House as executive director of the President’s Council on Science and Technology (PCAST), an S&T policy specialist at the Congressional Research Service (a think tank for Congress), and 18 years at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, directing studies on innumerable S&T policy topics.

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See you soon for yet more science and technology policy news and insights.

Debbie