by Georgia Turner
The day before the CCN 2025 conference kicked off in Amsterdam, attendees from career stages ranging from pre-PhD students to keynote speakers gathered together for an event focused on ‘Science for Social Good’. The three-hour session covered big-picture reflections on the role of scientists in society, as well as practical tips like how to switch research topics or start a non-profit. But across these varied topics, one thread ran through every discussion: Can we make contribution to social good not just an accepted, but integral, part of our lives as scientists?
All slides and links are here.
Jessica Thompson envisioned science for social good as a ‘tree’ bearing the fruits of a just, equitable and ecologically-embedded science-based society.
To begin the session, Jessica Thompson set the scene with a reflection on the meaning and context of doing science for social good. Envisioning this project as a ‘tree’, she discussed the essential ingredients we can plant in order to bear the ‘fruits’ of a just, ecologically-embedded science-based society. The biggest takeaway was the sheer range of practical ‘ingredients’ which together sustain the tree’s ‘roots’: such as political will (for example, participation in unions), diverse critical discourse and public scientific education. It was especially striking how closely these ingredients matched the good practices any scientist should follow to ensure research quality, like open science and clear communication. You can read the transcript of her remarks on her website.
But the reality is that, even if the ideal ways to achieve high-quality and socially-beneficial science align, these often slip down the priority list when faced with the financial and time pressures of an academic job. Weiji Ma began his talk by reflecting on this basic tension between pursuing traditional success in academia and pursuing social good. He took us through the range of social good initiatives he has contributed to in his career. These included co-founding the Rural China Education Foundation and the Science Action and Advocacy Network (ScAAN), an organisation which enables scientists to donate their research skills to non-profits, as well as work to improve culture within the university such as the ‘Growing up in Science’ initiative. Then,Weiji asked the audience to brainstorm about obstacles to participating in social action as a scientist. Among the most popular were questions of practicality: How do you find the time for these initiatives alongside your research? To this question, Wei Ji quoted a 2006 article he had written on the topic: ‘I’d rather be a mediocre scientist than drop my non-profit work’. Weiji also discussed systemic obstacles, such as evaluation systems in academia that heavily emphasize publications and grants, but often overlook community-building, outreach, and science-based social activism. Weiji suggested practical arguments that junior scientists can use to justify spending time on such activities. For example, at the present time, getting the public to object to funding cuts to science requires that scientists constantly help convey the value of science to the public. Or if a graduate student takes a science communication course, then that will also help their scientific presentations and/or writing.
Anne Urai spoke about how multiple ‘small fish’ individuals can come together to use their numbers to tackle big actors.
Next up were presentations by Anne Urai, Ili Ma and Jessica Thompson about their own journeys in science research alongside (or combined with) work for social good. It emerged across these talks that despite the apparent conflict between academic success and social good, there are myriad ways to do both. Anne Urai recounted her increasing involvement in climate advocacy, describing the power of individuals to enact change by coming together to bring down the ‘pillars’ which support traditional power structures. She confronted the potential for feeling paralysed in the face of the scale of the climate crisis with a quote from Rebecca Solnit: ‘The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.’
Ili Ma spoke about her experience of changing her research focus, bringing her fundamental-science background on learning and decision-making in adolescents to more applied questions about tackling adolescent susceptibility to misinformation. But she also emphasised that choice of research topic is a personal journey, with both fundamental and more applied research complementing each other to contribute to scientific progress. For those who want to change their research focus, she provided 5 concrete tips:
- Create the right opportunity, for example a grant application to fund your new research line.
- Take your time to understand the new field, this includes traditional approaches like reading papers but also connecting with non-academic experts in the field.
- Identify what you think is the best solution for the societal issue that you want to address and tailor your research questions to what is needed. This might mean that you need to use different methods than you’re used to. But remember that you have lots of transferable skills (coding, computational modeling, complex data analyses) and that foundation means that you’ll learn new skills faster.
- Use co-creation and collaborations with societal partners. This will maximize the relevance and impact of your research.
- Find collaborators in the new field, this helps to understand nuances and newer insights that you might otherwise overlook.
Finally, Jessica Thompson took us through her own research into aligning AI agents with human values. This line of work uses rigorous computational methods to study and intervene on the moral values and output of artificial agents. Such research provides a case in point to show that scientific progress can’t be cleanly separated from questions about our values. By aiming for a value-free science, we risk missing the political and moral values already implicitly embedded in the technologies we create.
During the interactive workshop, each group came up with ideas for social actions to address challenges in doing science for social good, arranging these along axes of ‘impact’ and ‘difficulty’.
After a short break, the attendees came together again for an interactive workshop. We separated into smaller groups, with each group tackling a difficult question about doing science for social good, including how to safeguard the products of our work from use by malicious actors, as well as how to honestly communicate scientific uncertainty to the public. When each group presented their ideas, it was clear that the simple act of talking with like-minded scientists can give fruit to new ideas very fast.* But it was also evident that many of these questions are too big to be neatly solved in a three-hour discussion (and maybe, ever).
However, as scientists it is not our job to shy away from challenges. Can we make the contribution to social good not just an accepted, but integral, part of our lives as scientists? Well, bringing together people from across the community in a session like this at a mainstream scientific conference is an excellent place to start.
* Here are some example actions that were discussed by participants:
- Community: Find other people with whom you can work collectively on these issues
- Join the Science for Social Good channel on the CCN 2025 discord and keep in touch
- Join your local trade union or student/professional association
- Scientists4Future, ClimateActionNeuPsyc Slack
- Science Communication and public engagement
- Volunteer to organize and speak at sci-com and outreach events (e.g., Pint of Science)
- Volunteer to speak with students about science (I’m a Scientist, Skype a Scientist)
- Advocate for the recognition of science communication and public engagement as an important part of scientific work
- After publishing a paper, create an accessible video about your work
- If your project involves human research participants, after finishing a project, create a short, accessible summary of the results to share with all participants. At the same time, invite feedback from participants on the interpretation and value of the work
- If you intend for your research to benefit people, include the relevant communities throughout the entire research process
- Policy engagement
- Do outreach targeted at specific policies
- Learn more about how policymaking works and build connections
- Within your institution
- Learn about/participate in divestment campaigns at your local institution
- What software/technologies are being encouraged/enforced?
- Organise a ‘Growing up in Science’ series
- Within your research community
- Publish in open science, not-for-profit journals
- Think about which licence to use when sharing code
- Host/participate in conference town hall meetings
- Transparency statements on total costs and carbon of e.g. machine learning models used in research
- Organise a ‘Science for Social Good’ event at another conference (all slides here).
CoCoSys lab 