Announcing the 2022 UCS Science Defenders
Published Dec 2, 2022
It is such an honor to receive this honor. I am truly humbled. See all honorees here.
Monica Unseld: Democratizing Access to Data and Science
Dr. Monica Unseld serves as executive director of Until Justice Data Partners, the nonprofit she founded whose name suggests an end in sight to the critical work she and her partners carry out. Indeed, she’d love to go out of business. “My goal is to shut my nonprofit down,” she says. Unseld works to democratize access to science and data for regular people seeking justice—environmental justice, housing justice, or holding powerful people accountable for their abuses. She began her career as a professor of biology but pivoted to activism after the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in 2010. “I felt strongly that this was science in real life, and we had to meet that moment,” she says.
Using the expertise she gained from her training as a scientist with advanced degrees in biology and public health, she now shares her know-how with her community in Louisville, KY, and beyond. “What's really useful to my community right now are my research skills”—which, she says, shouldn’t be gatekept among academics, or weaponized against people. Instead, she builds bridges. For example, after hearing anecdotes about tear gas exposure and menstrual cycle disruption, she helped launch a formal study at the University of Louisville on the possible links.
“I try to show people how data fits in their daily lives, and make it as accessible and easy as possible,” she says. “People discover that they already know much more about the situation than they think they know.”
Unseld says she’s proudest of normalizing the use of data in her community, be it a statistic on a protest sign that sends the media to follow up on the story behind it, or an evidence-backed challenge to the official version of events—e.g., the Louisville Police Department’s initial account of the murder of Breonna Taylor. “Scientists have this insider knowledge into how the universe works, and we don't even freely share the information with ourselves,” Unseld says. “But that model has never served us. Science needs to be what society needs it to be.”