Navigating the last mile to deliver research results
NANCY FRESCO: I’m Nancy Fresco and I’m a research associate professor at the IARC at UAF,  I’m here talking with my colleague Chris, oh, and I’m 52 years old.
CHRIS WAIGL: Yeah, hi, I’m Chris, Chris Waigl, I am a researcher at IARC also and I’m 55 years old. 
NANCY FRESCO: Yeah, we have not actually worked closely together but we have a lot of overlap, I think, in our research. I mostly work on climate change issues, but all my background was in ecology and forestry. 
I got pulled in way back when the research group Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic Planning started up in 2007. So that’s when I started down the slippery slope of doing climate change research.
CHRIS WAIGL: I’m German, I grew up in Germany, and at one point I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I studied physics, I got a degree in physics, and I was in France for a while. But then I dropped out of grad school. I taught. And I ended up in the software industry, and I did web tools and web development.
And it was only in 2011 when I came to Alaska that I really fell in love with the place. I started as staff, I was doing software development here first. I did a PhD in remote sensing, specializing on wildfire. Because I saw how important wildfire is in the north, and with a background in physics and experience handling big data, and computationally doing analysis on it, remote sensing seemed like a great fit. 
NANCY FRESCO: Working, trying to make sense of big data, trying to make sense of climate change, trying to make sense of what’s happening with fire in the boreal forest, all of those are the kind of large landscape questions that require expertise from a lot of different people. 
So I have no skills in making online tools but I work with other folks on the SNAP research team who do. So yeah, your background and your trajectory are completely different from mine, and yet we’ve ended up in kind of a similar place. 
CHRIS WAIGL: Isn’t that such an Alaskan thing? You meet all these people here with different trajectories, and you have so much overlap? When I lived in big cities, I lived in London. It was so hard to even meet people who even did different things from me. You had to go into an organized environment with some sort of organized group. 
But here it’s one of the attractions of working on Arctic topics, too. I think it’s much more common also in other parts of the Arctic, that there are not so many people. The people who are here have needs that other people don’t understand, but we understand each other’s needs.
NANCY FRESCO: Yeah.
CHRIS WAIGL: One of the things that was really a formative moment for me was that I got to attend the spring and fall workshops of the Alaska Fire Service. As a scientist driven by, we want to create knowledge, we want to find something out, we want to say, “Oh, this is how fire behaves or has changed or will change or these other factors that drive some behavior,” or “here’s a map of something related to fire, where it is, where it was, how severe it was, where it’s going to be.” 
So we often say, “Okay, a work is done, I’ve created the knowledge, I’ve published a paper, bang, you do the rest.”
Well, they can’t! The data is lying on some server somewhere, it’s in a format that they’ve never used, their GIS manager has already a lot of stuff to do. So really working with them and listening very closely what they actually need and then going this last mile, figuring out how to connect this end point of the science with the input point of the use of the science. 
That’s so attractive to me, and since I worked in the software industry where usability is a big topic, so I was predisposed to think about that in the context of science and scientific data. 
NANCY FRESCO: And I think that practicality, I mean maybe that does also tie into the Fairbanks mindset of being practical, being hands-on, being do it yourself, build your own cabin, make your own garden, that broader mindset of things being usable and practical. 
I think it’s something that you and I have in common — loving to do science but really wanting to see it connect with the people who need it.
CHRIS WAIGL: Yeah, and then I think the surprising point that comes on top of it is it makes the science better because you are talking with people who actually ask the really hard questions. If you’re just always in the academic environment, then the exact question you’re answering might not really go to the heart of what the practitioner on the ground sees. 
NANCY FRESCO: Yeah, and I think the most rewarding part of my job is, even though it’s challenging,  when I’m taking our climate projections and data and things we’ve crunched on a computer behind a desk and then I’m talking to people from a rural community who are actually living with the consequences of whatever change is ongoing. 
But the questions that are left unanswered are just as important as the ones that we might have an answer for. And I have to say, “Honestly, we don’t have a model for that. We need a model for that, we don’t have it.”
CHRIS WAIGL: I think by working so closely with practitioners outside the academic environment, it might help counteract the influence of the doubts, the mistrust in science, because you do need to connect with people and you need to give them something where they say “Oh, yeah,” or work with them to create something where they actually see that it’s useful and it’s helpful, and you are honest, and you are a partner for that. 
NANCY FRESCO: There already is uncertainty in the  existing models of what’s happening now. And then you throw that into the future and you add another layer of uncertainty in terms of, well, how well are we going to manage greenhouse gas emissions decades into the future, and how will that play out on the global scale? 
I think people do understand that on a fundamental level because it tallies with how we live our lives. If you’re unsure about whether it’s going to rain today, you still take an umbrella along in case. And people get that. People who plant gardens understand that it’s like risk of last frost, not guarantee of last frost. 
I’ve had to think a lot about human understanding of planning and uncertainty and change and how adaptable people are. I mean, humans as a species, we’ve been incredibly adaptable, it’s why we’re everywhere on the planet, in so many different lifestyles and ways of life. It’s obviously a huge strength of humans but the speed of change is really rapid now. And so adapting to that is hard and adapting to peoples’ ways of thinking and making those mesh with a more formal scientific outlook can be tricky.
Talking to community members, talking to people who are really struggling with weather, with climate, with risk, with hazard. It’s good to be reminded that it’s not just a scientific exercise, that it’s real. 
If you’re trying to predict where smoke goes, someone who has asthma or someone who has a newborn baby really cares about the answer to that. And that creating a better smoke model might really make a difference in that person’s life, or helping people with planning, or even creating a model that can lend credence to someone who’s trying to write a grant proposal to get some air filters for rural communities where there are no air filters, and there are elders who are breathing smoke.
CHRIS WAIGL: It’s good also to have a bit of division of labor there. Many people I talk to, they always want to know about education around it, “How can we educate our children, how can we get the skills that we can manage it with the tools that we have in our offices and our administration and our structures?” And about workforce development. “How can our next generation get jobs that have to do with managing these things?” And none of these are parts that I’m particularly involved in, but luckily I know who is, right? 
Another colleague who has a project about workforce development about firefighters from rural communities and goes into the communities, she and I are talking about, “Who are you talking with, who am I talking with, can I tag along with you, what did you find out?” 
We shouldn’t be just everybody for one’s own, going into a community and asking similar questions. We need to band together and have an exchange about that. That is a much better way of doing it than competing all the time.