Chief Science Officers come from all around the world. They demonstrate leadership by implementing action plans that engage others, are related to science, and involve areas of STEM and science that matter to them personally.
Many Chief Science Officers have implemented action plans that are related to the environment. In this Earth Day blog, we’ll share three different plans from CSOs. We hope you’ll be inspired to take action and make the planet a better place!
CSO Amely is from Sonora, Mexico. Through her action plan, she’s building a committee called “CSOs for the World.” She is bringing together students to talk about environmental awareness and concerns from their own communities so they can share examples or knowledge with other CSOs. With the size of the network, she’ll be connecting students from several countries. She said, “For me it was important to start this committee because I noticed that we are all concerned about the planet and how we are all affecting it. If we start sharing options with others, or learn what they’re doing, we can each get a new idea and take a small action that will make big impact on the world.”
CSO Vrutik, from Kenya, created an action plan is to influence people to utilize their waste to their advantage. He said we need to reduce the waste from our daily “because the negative effects posed to the environment are atrocious.” He’s encouraging others to reuse items in different ways to reduce negative impacts to the environment. He said that figuring out how to do that is also a great to boost student’s creativity and innovation skills. He demonstrates this through the projects he has personally created projects to reuse waste, including making use of heat energy from smoke created by industry to generate electricity by the use of a ThermoElectric Generator, and making a massager from a non-functioning PS3 controller.
In an upcoming Kenya CSO workshop, CSO Vrutik plans to influence and involve other members of CSO Kenya in his action plan by giving students weekly activities related to reusing waste in a creative manner. He hopes to influence first CSOs, then their friends, to do the same – starting a chain that will continue.
One of the CSOs in Arizona, U.S., is Nikhil. In his third year as a Chief Science Officer, he has realized that he can spread awareness to his peers and their families, showing them that STEM is in literally everything, even the things that we don’t usually connect it with. That approach, he said, “has successfully sprouted into the beautiful environmental club at my school.” The club has created PSAs about the environment to spread the message at the school; members have planned cleanups where they work to restore and grow community parks with trees; students have even met with STEM professionals, to learn the deep connection between the environment and how STEM has been a vital factor in the changes that we have made.
CSO Nikhil sums it up this way: “Earth Day is one of those awesome days throughout the year where everyone takes a moment to demonstrate their support for the environment; however, people usually forget that EVERYDAY can be Earth Day! As Chief Science Officers, we hope to continue making a difference, one plastic bottle and one creative idea at a time.”
In honor of Earth Day, here are links to related CSO programs: the Sustainability Episode of CSO Perspective, the student-driven YouTube channel, and the Earth Day series of Zoom in on Science
[1] STEM = science, technology, engineering, mathematics
