Science communicator and San Diego State University Masters of Evolutionary Biology student Dillon Jones’ use of digital spaces has evolved throughout his career. In addition to highlighting his work on the evolutionary history of Middle American reptiles and amphibians, Dillon is part of a growing number of young scientists who are using platforms such as Instagram to showcase the behind-the-scenes lives of scientists to the broader public. I sat down with Dillon to delve into his journey blending graduate student life with social media, the importance of self-discipline, and how he juggles the two worlds.
First let me start by saying I adore your Instagram posts! It’s rare to find social media content that’s both funny AND informative in this space. At what point did you decide to expand outward from your research and become a science communicator?
Well, it sort of came in two different stages. The first – being a scientist – happened early on in my academic career. I was always interested in learning more, but it was a string of mentors during my undergraduate degree that really showed me how incredible being a scientist is. It’s a path I’ve been dead set on since my freshman year of college.
The science communicator part came a bit later. I had already been doing outreach and education since I was in high school, and continued this into my undergrad. At around 20 or so I decided that I wanted to make a science communication Instagram account to share cool information about conservation, biology, and science in general.
How I communicate science has since morphed and evolved into its current iteration. While I have been doing it for some years now, it’s only been since this year that I really started to push and try to make this a career for myself!
You and I met through social media over the course of this morphing and evolution – first through Mammalz and then through Instagram. Tell me more about your use of social media over the years to communicate the life of a scientist
My use of social media has certainly evolved quite a bit. In its current iteration, my bread and butter content really falls into one of two categories on Instagram: short form videos and mini-“presentations.”
The short form videos require looking into trending video styles, audio, and topics in order to create something that will really resonate with my audience. I try to do topics that represent the life of a biologist and graduate student or are meant to highlight issues such as sustainability, science misinformation, and anti-science rhetoric. Though certainly several of them are just to make someone laugh or to jump onto a particular meme bandwagon.
The mini-presentations are usually where the bulk of my education efforts actually occur. These are more-or-less 10 slides where I dive into some topic I really find fascinating! Sometimes these are highly biology theory-based topics, while other times they dive into the social issues related to biology – from the evolution of venom, to should we be conserving honeybees, to LGBTQ+ relationships in nature. I try to use these posts as a means to really express the topics and issues I find interesting!
When we first met you were using the tag @contemporary_conservationist, but have since switched to using your own name. What was the motivation behind that change?
At the start I posted wildlife photography with long captions about some topic. My goal at that stage was to bring conservation into the 21st century and talk about issues with more nuance and forethought than I was seeing at that time. However, I quickly ran into issues over the years. First, having enough wildlife pictures to post regularly and consistently was tough for me. There would occasionally be weeks where I just didn’t have a picture (often during the winter when both the animals and myself would go into a hibernative state). The second issue I ran into was that people did not read the captions. At least, not as many as I would have liked. The primary goal of that account was to educate, not necessarily show off photography. While you absolutely can do both with that format, it wasn’t working for what I wanted to do. The last issue that took me years to realize was that I had inadvertently pigeon-holed myself. The account name, @contemporary_conservationist, was quite impersonal, a bit hard to remember, and made me feel like I had to ONLY post about conservation.
It was also during those few years I got into videography, graphic design, and personal branding quite a bit. So, in late 2020, I fundamentally changed my entire account and personal brand. I changed my social handles to @DillonTheBiologist, started posting pictures of myself way more often, and focused on being a person rather than an account. For my introverted self that was honestly really difficult at first, but I absolutely do not regret making that change in the slightest! It really allowed me to be goofier on social media, enabled me to make considerably more content, and really do whatever I want. That creative freedom is what really let my account flourish and grow into something I absolutely love doing!
Creating habits, sticking to goals, and trying to accomplish something everyday is really what it all falls down to.
Dillon Jones
Science communicator
San Diego State University, Masters of Evolutionary Biology student
No kidding! With thousands of followers, it’s clear that change has really resonated with a lot of current and emerging scientists and it’s apparent you’re having a blast doing it. How do you manage to keep posting with such frequency – surely juggling both research and an active social media schedule must be challenging?
Discipline for the most part. I’m a big believer that discipline equals freedom. That means that every morning I work on creating SOMETHING, even if it’s bad. Every Friday I spend my time at a local coffee shop and work on bigger projects that I’m involved with. That discipline means I also stop working at 7pm and take a full rest day on weekends no matter what I need to accomplish. I also always unwind at the end of the day with some music. I’ve played guitar for around 10 years now and it still remains my favorite way to unwind. Usually with a cocktail off to the side!
On my best, most motivated days, that discipline allows me to create a ton of content and have fun while doing so. On my worst days, that discipline allows me to keep making progress even when I don’t want to do anything at all. Creating habits, sticking to goals, and trying to accomplish something every day is really what it all falls down to.
I feel like the same can be said of science – it really is all about discipline. Of course, the very nature of science is that we deal with uncertainties. What have you found to be the biggest surprise since starting your Masters research?
The sheer quantity of data. My current dataset works with well over 2000 species wherein I need to process data related to where they are found and how they are related to one another. Unfortunately, this data is messy, incomplete, riddled with errors, or not directly available from a source.
To overcome those challenges, I develop custom scripts in the programming language R that performs whatever functions I need. Sometimes it’s as easy as removing a specific column in a table. However other times I have to program functions that require me to completely change the data for me to use it. While it is a lot more computer work than I’m used to, the challenges of this data manipulation are really fun to me as it requires a lot of problem solving and creativity in how I go about working with these massive datasets!
As a fellow biologist, many of our colleagues had their work schedules changed or fieldwork canceled during the pandemic. Did you have to make adjustments to your research?
With my specific work, the pandemic really only affected my mind. I currently don’t have field work and the vast majority of my research and science communication is done at a computer so when lockdowns started happening and I had to self-isolate, at first I thought I would get a lot done.
That was completely false.
Really what the pandemic did for me is it allowed me to reorient and reevaluate what is important to me. I was dead set on the “finish a Masters, go for a PhD, then PostDoc, then Professor” track. While I still want to do that, I’ve since realized that I have more passions and options that I really should be exploring. Now that lockdown restrictions are largely easing up and vaccine distributions are going well, I’ve been given newfound energy and conviction towards my future. It took a lot of self-reflection, self-love, and self-care to get through the pandemic, but I’m so happy I focused on myself instead of burying my nose into work.
Onward and upward as they say! What do you hope to work on as things open up?
My dream project is one that really combines my love for field-based research as well as large, community science-fed datasets. We live in the age of big data. The amount of information and knowledge available at just the click of a button is mind-blowing. That said, I also have such a hard time doing a project with no field component! My dream project is one that takes information from these large datasets and then supplements it with field-based biology. For example, I love the salamanders in the genus Bolitoglossa. While we have pretty good data on them for the most part, there’s still a lot about their geographic ranges, systematics, and evolutionary history that still needs to be discovered. It’s a taxonomic group I hope to work with soon!
At the same time, I’ve got more projects than I can count! I’m currently ironing out the details for a trip that I can take with my audience to Belize in 2022, a series of collaborations with the live streaming platform Mammalz, and some larger community science projects that involve my entire community. I always have a multitude of projects in the pipeline and it’s always interesting to see if they come to fruition or not!
You can follow Dillon’s science adventures on his Instagram as well as at LearnAdventurously.com, a community he founded in 2021 to connect with fellow scientists, science communicators, and science enthusiasts through online competitions and platforms such as Discord.
