By Rachel Young
For Caren Cooper ’88, science is about connection. A professor in NC State’s Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, Cooper has returned to her alma mater as co-director of NC State’s Citizen Science Campus to teach the next generation how to engage the public in scientific discovery.
What was your path to NC State and citizen science? While I was earning my degree [in zoology], I worked on a project studying black bears in the mountains of North Carolina. We had citizen science volunteers from Earthwatch — an organization that helps people go on vacations as field biologists — helping us with the study. It primed me to be open to the participatory sciences as I matured in my career. As I did fieldwork all over the world, first as an ornithologist, and then as a social scientist, participatory sciences became a strength here at NC State. I was excited to be able to come back to my home state, into my home school, as a professor.
What is citizen science, and why is it important? Citizen science refers to public engagement in scientific activities, usually in data collection. Imagine the research questions you could ask if you had 1,000 people or 10,000 people, or 100,000 people sharing observations with you. The world is your study site.
What’s your goal for NC State’s Citizen Science Campus? We developed the Citizen Science Campus program to add cohesion and amplify the efforts to grow our campus programs because they’re happening throughout the different colleges and research labs. Our campus is engaging different communities across North Carolina and around the world. One vision for the future is engaging our whole student campus community in gathering data. It’s a really powerful way of having human sensors — a lot of different eyes, ears, valuable knowledge and experiences they can share. With citizen science, it’s finding ways to make meaning and sense of that data and using it to guide decisions.
Photograph by Marc Hall ’20 MA, NC State
Tell Us What You Think
Do you have a personal connection to this story? Did it spark a memory? Want to share your thoughts? Send us a letter, and we may include it in an upcoming issue of NC State magazine.
