“Hi, I’m an #ActualLivingScientist”

By Megan Lynch

One of the great community-building tools on Twitter is the hashtag. Soon after joining Twitter, scientists learned how to leverage the hashtag to build scientific community online and to communicate to non-scientists as well. Herpetologist Dr. David Steen has used the hashtags #notacottonmouth and #notacopperhead to ID snakes for frightened laypeople as well as to argue that venomous species can be lived alongside without killing them. As you can imagine, he got a lot of requests for identification via Twitter and also gained a lot of new followers, scientists and non-scientists alike. So when someone on Twitter was giving him grief about how useful or not his research might be, he pointed out a survey that said most Americans couldn’t name a living scientist. He then introduced himself as one. A follower of his suggested the hashtag #actuallivingscientist and it took off from there.