Highlight
The world is her laboratory: NSF-supported PhD Student, accredited United Nations observer, studies Convention on Biological Diversity's engagement with biofuels and synthetic biology
Deborah Scott, NSF IGERT Graduate Training fellow, examines local seeds and plants from across the globe at Peoples Biodiversity Festival, a major side forum of the Meeting of Conference of the Parties, United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, H
Achievement/Results
When Deborah Scott travels internationally to the negotiations of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), she is heading to her laboratory to study the production and enactment of global governance firsthand. From Japan to India to South Africa to Montreal, Scott travels the world for her research, which focuses on how people in different countries incorporate scientific uncertainty into developing environmental laws, treaties, and regulations, using issues of biofuels and synthetic biology as her case study. The ability to define a regulatory framework for these emerging technologies at all levels, from local to global, is critical for their use. Through her global travels and research, Scott is contributing to the process of how governance and regulation will continue to come to pass as the technologies develop.
With NSF support as an IGERT Graduate Training Fellow, Scott, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Rutgers University and accredited UN observer, attends and observes negotiating events of the CBD and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) as part of her doctoral research – taking copious notes and pictures, following up with negotiators and participants for interviews, and understanding the evolution of documents through rounds of revisions. In addition, she studies what happens leading up to these events – what arguments are contested, attempts to reframe the discussion by civil society groups, and the positioning of industry groups.
After graduating law school in 2005, Scott became a lawyer and briefly practiced international environmental law before deciding to move to Nairobi, Kenya to conduct advocacy work around food sovereignty with ACORD, a pan-African Non-Governmental Organization. When determining her next step after three years in Kenya, Scott decided to attend graduate school in geography at Rutgers. At Rutgers, Scott was awarded a competitive graduate training fellowship in the Sustainable Fuel Solutions Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. IGERTs are the flagship interdisciplinary doctoral training program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Sustainable Fuels IGERT Project brings together over 40 faculty members affiliated with 8 different graduate programs and over a dozen Rutgers centers with interests in sustainable fuel solutions.
Thanks to her direct stipend support plus international travel and subsistence supplements and an IGERT Graduate Training fellow, Scott has been able to make extended visits to attend major UN negotiating events in Durban, South Africa; Hyderabad, India; and Montreal, Canada. In addition, she was able to work as an intern for the CBD Secretariat in Montreal to prepare background information and analysis for the next round of negotiations. While interning with the Secretariat, she was also able to conduct interviews and additional research for her dissertation. “Social scientists undertaking ethnography usually spend significant amounts of time in the field, studying the relationships and cultural intricacies of a place,” Scott said. “I’m part of a community of scholars exploring how to adapt ethnographic tools to meaningfully study short-lived but highly important events, such as international negotiations.
By studying the processes by which international environmental policy is made – looking at how scientific knowledge is used, whose voices are heard, and how uncertainties and risks are described – we can explore how those decision-making processes could be improved.” For Scott, even beyond the direct financial support, participating in the Sustainable Fuels IGERT has proven to be an excellent complement to her academic interests and has brought valuable new information and ideas to her research. One example Scott cites is her IGERT-supported field study in South Africa at the Center of Material Process Synthesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, before the Durban meeting of the UNFCCC. There she visited academic labs and small scale pilot plants where researchers are leveraging South Africa’s historic expertise in synfuels from coal to develop new processes for sustainable fuels from biomass. As her first extended interaction with practicing physical scientists and engineers in the biofuels field, the trip also afforded valuable opportunities for extending her ethnographic research. “Not only are there very different tools being brought to the challenge of sustainable fuels, but also there are different assumptions and ideas about what the challenges, problems, and potential solutions are,” she said. “Being part of the IGERT has helped me expand my research to include examining how scientific communities consider scientific uncertainties and risks related to biofuels and synthetic biology,” she said. “It has been a valuable experience for me to be a part of the Fuels IGERT’s diverse intellectual community, beyond the social sciences, and at Rutgers and abroad.”
Address Goals
Synthetic biology is a rapidly emerging field that is already responsible for exciting breakthrough advances that make it possible for industrial microbes such as yeasts to produce products that they normally would not, such as drugs, biofuels and other important chemical building blocks. Notable examples include arteminisin, the key component of a front-line drug to fight malaria, and a broad range of products otherwise obtained from petrochemicals, including lubricants and diesel fuel. Synthetic biology is truly at the frontiers of knowledge with high potential for positive societal impact and thus is integral to the NSF strategic goals for assuring the Nation’s continuing global leadership in all dimensions of both fundamental and transformational science and engineering. Assuring realistic outcomes from advances in synthetic biology depends not only on the continued generation of new fundamental knowledge and its successful translation from the lab-scale to real-world scale, but also on attention to public perceptions of risks and benefits and the resulting actions by regulatory bodies at all levels from local to global.
In this context , the activity described in this highlight provides an example of the value of the NSF-funded IGERT graduate training program. Specifically, it illustrates how the direct financial support plus programmatic activities of a student’s IGERT Traineeship are helping to equip this young scientist to be a next generation leader at the interfaces between “hard science” – as in synthetic biology, and “hard law” as in environmental regulatory legislation, and “soft law” as in the deliberations of multi-national regulatory and treaty bodies such as the United Nations and its various deliberative entities. Student stipend and travel and subsistence support by our IGERT project directly enabled the student’s trips to observe negotiations at the United Nations meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and her ensuing extended internship with the CBD Secretariat.
In addition to the longer-term contribution to the student’s intellectual and professional career growth, direct outcomes included strengthening the the student’s dissertation meeting the CBD’s need to gather and analyze data about the emerging field of synthetic biology on a strict timetable to produce and disseminate information to inform its member countries.
