Howard Garrison Advocacy Fellow
Adrian Bondy, PhD
Adrian Bondy is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.
Describe your interest in participating in the program:
Bondy: Many years ago, I was turned away from my undergraduate campus’ blood drive because of a lifetime ban on gay and bisexual men. With a group of other students, I organized an awareness campaign, armed with the latest data on HIV contamination risks, that led our university to stop hosting blood drives until the policy changed. It took years, but donor criteria were eventually rewritten across the U.S. and beyond around specific, higher-risk behaviors rather than fear of stigmatized groups. This taught me two lifelong lessons. First, the rules that structure our shared institutions are not always guided by the best available evidence—that gap has to be closed deliberately. Second, scientific evidence and committed advocacy, when brought together, are a powerful engine for positive social change.
Since then, my primary goals have been at the bench, investigating how populations of neurons work together to generate perception and make decisions. I'm proud of the impact I have made within my field. Yet when I reflect on the growing challenges our society faces and the powerful role scientists can have as citizens and advocates, the gap between my work in the lab and the world outside of it feels too great to ignore.
I am at a point in my career where the standard path is to start my own lab. I have decided instead to use my scientific expertise to directly affect policy change. Our country faces interlocking crises, from worsening economic inequality and educational outcomes to declining life expectancy, climate change, and democratic backsliding. Maddeningly, evidence- based solutions exist for these problems, and where they do not, investment in future research is often the most promising path to find them. But rather than being embraced, the scientific enterprise itself is under attack, and public trust in scientific expertise is at historic lows. My own field—basic, federally funded biomedical research—sits at the center of this storm.
Scientists have unique perspectives, expertise, skills, and credibility that compel us to act in this moment. We can communicate the relevance of scientific research to policymakers and the public in a way others simply cannot. Acting on that conviction, I helped build publicusaresearchbenefits.com, a crowd-sourced catalog of societal benefits that stem from government-funded research in the United States. I also designed and led a neuroscience outreach program at a Philadelphia public high school with few resources for hands-on science, building young people’s confidence and sense of belonging in STEM.
My aim now is to transition to a full-time career in science policy, researching, advocating for, and effecting data-driven approaches to solve our society’s biggest challenges. The Howard Garrison Advocacy Fellowship would give me many of the skills I need to make that transition: a structured curriculum on policymaking processes, an introduction to stakeholders and leaders in science policy, and tools for effective science communication to elected officials and the public.
How do you plan to use the knowledge and experience gained through your participation in the Howard Garrison Advocacy Program?
Bondy: The Howard Garrison Fellowship will give me formal skills, experience, and a professional network to launch the next phase of my career as a scientist in the policy space.
In the near term, I will bring the fellowship’s communications and advocacy coaching back to my current work: writing op-eds that make the public case for federally funded research, a direct extension of my work on publicusaresearchbenefits.com, and strengthening my volunteering with the Princeton Electoral Innovation Lab. I also hope to contribute to my FASEB member society, SEBM, by seeking its nomination for the Science Policy Committee’s early-career seat or writing for its journal.
Longer term, the fellowship will inform my applications for immersive science policy fellowships in the coming year, including the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship, which places fellows within the federal government, and the Eagleton Science and Politics Program Fellowship, which places fellows in the New Jersey state government. Furthermore, the workshops, FASEB committee meetings and symposium, and the Capitol Hill Day will give me a broad perspective on the range of policy careers I want to pursue next. I am considering a future as a policy researcher, advocate, policymaker—even local elected office. These experiences will give me a more concrete understanding of what these roles are really like, and pathways into them.
Using no more than 250 words, describe your research as you would to a non-scientist.
Bondy: Every day we make decisions by weighing evidence. Should I bring an umbrella? You may notice the gray sky, the damp air, the forecast you looked up earlier, and at some point you stop deliberating and make up your mind. My research asks what the brain does during those two steps: accumulating evidence and committing to a choice. We study this in rats playing a simple game. They listen to a stream of clicks on their left and right and turn toward whichever side had more, while we record their brain activity. Using experiments like these, neuroscientists recently found that many brain regions carry signals related to this accumulation of evidence. That raises a deep question: do all parts of the brain work together to make a decision, or do different parts decide separately? To find out, we developed tools to listen to thousands of neurons across the brain at once. What we found looked like a single, shared decision everywhere—a coherent system rather than separate modules.
A second question is what happens when you stop gathering evidence and make up your mind. Is this an abrupt switch or a continuous shift? We found it’s a switch: in our neural recordings, we observed a precise moment when the brain abruptly stops taking in new evidence, like a gavel coming down. Making up your mind, then, is a striking, rapid transition from one brain state to another.
Briefly describe any past or present participation in additional career exploration activities, experiences, and/or programs.
Bondy: Outside the lab, I have focused on science communication and outreach, promoting open science, as well as on service and leadership within my field.
In science communication and outreach, over the last year, I joined a team of researchers to build publicusaresearchbenefits.com, a public catalog of concrete ways federally funded science has improved Americans’ everyday lives. We responded to the urgent need to increase public awareness of the tangible benefits of basic science amid unprecedented threats to its funding. The project received a grant from the Simons Foundation and has been highlighted in The Transmitter. I also designed and led a neuroscience outreach program at a majority-minority Philadelphia public charter high school, recruiting and training graduate-student volunteers to deliver interactive lessons on brain anatomy, neural signaling, and sensory systems.
Promoting open science, I developed and openly released a family of research tools for brain-wide neural recording in rodents—now widely adopted across systems neuroscience— and taught their use in international courses and conferences.
To build my service and leadership skills, I served for three years on the Program Committee for the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference, the premier international meeting in my field.
Recently, as I plan my transition to policy and advocacy, I began volunteering with the Princeton Electoral Innovation Lab on projects that use science and data to research democratic reforms and empower voters. I have also attended the University of Pennsylvania Science Outreach Initiative’s series of science communication workshops.
Adrian Bondy is a member of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine.