Shermin de Silva

Note from Jai: Dr. Shermin de Silva is an elephant researcher and she has a project in the #SciFund Challenge (check out Help Elephants & People in Sri Lanka). She has a doctorate in biology from the University of Pennsylvania and she is the founder of  the Elephant Forest and Environment Conservation Trust.

During my six years in grad school slaving over grants and statistics, I avoided starvation thanks to the lunch trucks hovering around West Philly.  They sell everything from vegan chili to doner kebabs, rescuing hundreds from this predicament each day. I used to be puzzled at why there were TWO Mexican trucks competing side by side.  Everyone seemed to know which one was better –you could tell from the lengths of the lines.  Wouldn’t the other want to move off to some remote corner and claim its poor victims all to itself?  In stark contrast to this was the strategy of the ever-elusive wandering cupcake truck – a beast that was seldom spotted, brightening up random corners on each day.  Well, you couldn’t count on a cupcake for desert, but you could always count on the burritos.

Jai Ranganathan

What’s the secret to raising money for your science by crowdfunding? The secret is that there is no secret.

Just ask Lindsey Peavey. She’s a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara and she is taking part in the #SciFund Challenge. Her project, Turtles in the Deep, is doing wonderfully well. As of this writing, nine days after #SciFund projects went live, she has reached 80% of her $2,500 target. How did she do it? I spoke with her yesterday and this is what I learned.

Lindsey’s research and her #SciFund project focus on the fate of the threatened olive ridley sea turtle in the Pacific Ocean. From the beginning, she designed her project so that it would connect with a general audience. And she could put very specific faces on part of that audience: her family in Maine, far from the Pacific and the olive ridley. Could she connect her family (and lots of people like them) to a place they might never go and to a species they might never see?  If you check out Lindsey’s project, you’ll see that she more than succeeded in crafting a message that is personal, easy to understand, and extremely relatable, regardless of where you are.