Sarah Evanega works in a challenging space.
No, not her pandemic home office or even her car to free up needed internet bandwidth for her three young children’s remote schoolwork. Those are minor compared to a career spent depolarizing and demystifying issues around genetic engineering, especially given the disconnect between scientific consensus on its safety and lingering public skepticism.
As founder and director of the Cornell Alliance for Science, a global communications initiative in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), Evanega faces down misperceptions, myths and misinformation about GMOs — or to use the scientific term, agricultural biotechnology. Now she’s also taking on the conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns that swirl around the pandemic, vaccines, climate change and synthetic biology.