Almost every academic talk, no matter how eloquent the speaker, is a bit boring. That, at least, was cosmologist Shaun Hotchkiss’s experience. And as a postdoc, he started thinking, “Why is that the case? Can I do a better job?”
At the time, Hotchkiss was at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He had earned his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2010 and then done postdoctoral stints in Finland and the UK before returning to his native New Zealand in 2016. Like any academic, he’d gone to and given plenty of talks. He started hatching plans to improve the dissemination of research results to scientists and the public.
In 2021, while still a postdoc, Hotchkiss launched Effective Research Sharing. So far he has organized online conferences, cosmology conversations, mini workshops, and explanatory apps. He got started before the pandemic forced people online, but once it did, many scientists were willing to try new modes of digital communication. (See the story on hybrid conferences in Physics Today, May 2023, page 23.)
As the business gets off the ground, Hotchkiss talks about the rewards and challenges and the directions he sees it taking. “If you had asked me in 2020, I just wanted to try things to see what would stick,” he says. “If you ask me now, in 2023, I have a business model.”
PT: What drew you to physics?
HOTCHKISS: I wanted to ask the fundamental questions about life, the universe, and everything. Fundamental physics and philosophy seemed to 17-year-old me as the pathways. When I started my PhD, experimental and observational physics seemed more important than theoretical physics, but I think theory is more fun. Because you are less in touch with reality, you’ve got more freedom.
PT: Why did you leave academia?
HOTCHKISS: Doing research in theoretical physics, I realized a few things. One was that there are lots and lots and lots of compelling models out there. As a theorist you can try to come up with your own compelling model and add a new tree to the forest, or you can add branches to an existing tree. But how do you know which is the right tree? I didn’t want to waste my entire career building a gorgeous tree only for the experimental chainsaw to come and cut down my tree. I didn’t feel like I could judge which theory is more likely to be correct.
At the same time, there were things in the academic world that bugged me, and I wanted to fix them. If I fix them, that’s actually going to change the world in a way that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for me. So I was always making what to me felt like the most natural decision at each point.
PT: What is the vision you had in starting Effective Research Sharing?
HOTCHKISS: I believe that understanding the universe has intrinsic value. And I believe that intrinsic value should be given to the people who are paying for the fundamental research: the taxpayers. My business aims to help researchers share results with each other and with the public.
I had thought we had very powerful tools—Zoom, Slack, YouTube, and others—yet the online conferences I attended were not satisfying. Very early in 2020 I posted a tweet saying, “I want to organize a good online conference; does anyone want to help out?” Five people ended up joining me. We started thinking about what a good online conference would look like. Nothing was sacred. We quickly concluded that one of the biggest problems was that people just copy and pasted in-person conference formats into online settings.
We came up with the format for Cosmology from Home, a two-week conference: Participants watch the talks on their own time ahead of the conference. They have time to think things over, and the discussions are so much better. Scheduled interaction time is usually limited to two blocks totaling six hours a day. I’m surprised that other online conferences are not taking this approach.
PT: Tell us about Cosmology Talks and the associated mini workshops.
HOTCHKISS: I found that although I would get bored in academic research talks, I was listening to hours and hours of podcasts and not getting bored at all. I realized it was the conversation, and I started thinking, why don’t we present cosmology as a conversational talk? So in early 2020, I launched Cosmology Talks, a YouTube channel aimed at cosmologists. I invite someone who has a recent paper, and I just talk to them about the paper. The format seems to be striking a chord with the cosmology community.
Now I follow up the talks with mini workshops. They are two-hour, live discussions to which a colleague and I invite researchers doing adjacent work to answer participants’ questions. At the moment, we are running these once a month, and we are building up to run them more often. The typical attendance has been 30 to 45 people.
One challenge for any online meeting is time zones. It’s always 3am somewhere. We learned from Cosmology from Home that it’s better to schedule a discussion to be at 11pm for someone and allow them access to the Americas and all of Europe and Africa. It’s not that we are US- or Eurocentric. But there are more researchers there, and the majority of researchers who are not in those parts of the world want to interact with them.
PT: What is your business model?
HOTCHKISS: Attendees pay €30 (about $33) to participate in Cosmology from Home. I request a €15 donation to participate in the mini workshops.
My biggest revenue sources so far are explanatory apps and videos. For those I am really a project manager. I find a set of designers with the skills to create the graphics, the animations, and the interactive features; I broker on behalf of the scientist client; and I act as scientific consultant.
I’m working on other “From Home” series. Later this year, Parity Violation from Home and Flavour Physics from Home will debut. They will start as three- or four-day conferences. I’ve been talking with people about launching things like “Neuroscience from Home” and “Condensed-Matter Physics from Home.” I think the “From Home” conference format is franchisable.
PT: How do you find clients?
HOTCHKISS: My first client was Te Ao Mārama, the Centre for Fundamental Inquiry at the University of Auckland. They had sent out an email saying they had money that was expiring and did anyone have an idea for what to do with it. That was in 2019, and I ended up organizing a video for them that explains the origin of DNA versus RNA and which came first. I arranged for a YouTuber to make and host it.
Since then, my clients have been grant holders who had money to spare or had funding that included outreach. The sort of people I was contacting for the outreach stuff were sitting ducks, in some sense. They loved the idea of doing this, and they just didn’t have the time. They were, like, “I just have to share my dream? That sounds awesome.”
My sales pitch is not “You have to prove impact on your next grant.” It’s more “Let’s tell the world about your cool stuff.”
PT: What do you have in the works?
HOTCHKISS: I have finished an app that explains gravitational lensing. It’s an educational tutorial that ends with a game. I have a hot-gas-versus-dark-matter explainer app in the works. I also have funding for creating an expanding-universe simulator that shows how light rays will be perceived by an observer; we are still discussing what the simulation will include. Another project that is in the negotiation stage will be on the cosmic microwave background. The user will follow the journey of a photon from emission through gravitational lensing, reionization, scattering off electrons, and passage through and scattering from hot gas. The app would tell users what the Planck satellite and other instruments are measuring. And the idea would be to show how cosmologists use various physical processes to learn about the universe.
PT: What are the biggest challenges in running your business?
HOTCHKISS: In 2020 and 2021 I kept a half-time position as a postdoc at the University of Auckland. That was psychologically demanding for me. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to do two extremely different but very creative jobs at the same time.
Being a researcher half-time was difficult on an internal ethics front. With research, I marked my time on my research salary, but if I didn’t get the thing done that I wanted to get done, what do I do? Do I stop and tell the guy who is paying my salary that I’m stopping for now? Or do I keep working on it, in which case I get stressed because I have a business I’m trying to run? The advantage was that I kept my foot in the door, so I could have stayed in research.
Last year, 2022, was my first year focusing solely on my business. I’m not yet making as much as I did as a full-time postdoc, but things are growing.
Initially, I found a lot of the simple stuff, like learning about taxes and writing contracts, scary. I was worried about inadvertently committing fraud. I didn’t have a mentor. Now that it’s been a while, I have that figured out.
PT: What are your long-term goals?
HOTCHKISS: I’d like to add things like a searchable transcript of the videos from our talks. And to expand the “From Home” conferences and mini workshops into other areas of science.
Another thing I would like to do is lobby governments to mandate that a portion of money from grants be spent on outreach, say 5%. Rather than allowing it, mandating it. The argument is that taxpayers are paying for the research, and they need to get some value from it. Overnight, outreach would go from an almost nonexistent industry to a tens or hundreds of millions of dollars industry.
I would also love to take a stab at improving scientific publishing. If we were building from the ground up in 2023, I don’t feel we would use the format of the peer-reviewed paper. We would have something that is more hyperlinked, something more incremental that you can add to as you are continuing research. Maybe there is a pathway where papers are still allowed, but other submissions, like wikis, are also possible and quantifiable within grant applications.
I don’t think the act of peer review is improving people’s papers enough to justify the time spent by the reviewer. The value is the threat of peer review—it makes people write better papers. I think it would be better if reviews were made public. Good insights would be shared with the community, and bad insights would not hold back progress.
I’m not trying to fix how people publish their findings right now because it has too much inertia. Those things are not feasible for a small business. Maybe one day.
PT: What are the highs and lows of your work?
HOTCHKISS: What I like least is the loneliness of being a small-business owner working alone. When things are bad, that is amplified. I have a wife and child, so I’m not all alone in that sense, and they are stakeholders in the business, but they are not invested in the day-to-day workings of it.
What I like most is that I get paid to think about and work in all of cosmology. As a researcher, I had to pick my project and spend all my time thinking about it. Now I can be a generalized expert.
