Brandon Zimmerman

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Before he was a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore, Brandon Zimmerman was a postdoc.

And there was one event that every early career researcher passing through the lab was encouraged to consider.

the research slam.

You know exactly the moment he's describing.

You have about one sentence before their eyes drift toward the snacks.

Only at the research slam, it's in front of a panel of judges.

The research slam is more than a contest for the scientists who go through it.

It's a skill that follows them everywhere.

Funding pitches, policy conversations, grant writing, and the simple moment of explaining your work to someone else.

Christine Zacco is the operations manager in the academic engagement office at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Christine knows this because her first thoughts about Lawrence Livermore were from the outside.

That kind of mystery creates distance.

The way across that distance is communication.

Clear, relatable communications.

From her very first day, Christine's job was the postdocs, the early career scientists passing through the lab, learning how to build a life in research.

About 10 years in, she was invited to watch the University of California's Grad Slam in San Francisco, a competition where graduate students had to make complicated research understandable to people outside their field.

Christine and her boss had some time together after the event as they took the train back that day.

We got on the BART train and went, we have to do this.

We have to do this for our postdocs.