Training Scientists for a Changing World

As scientific advances move into healthcare, education, law, and public life, they influence decisions, expectations, and debates far beyond the laboratory. Today’s scientists therefore need more than technical expertise; they must also understand the ethical and societal dimensions of their work to ensure scientific progress responds to public needs and meaningfully serves society.

That reality requires us to rethink how we prepare the next generation of scientists. For decades, scientific education has been organized primarily around disciplinary expertise and preparation for academic research careers. That model has produced extraordinary breakthroughs. But the world around science has changed. Emerging scientists are entering a research environment shaped by artificial intelligence, interdisciplinary collaboration, limited academic career pathways, and growing uncertainty around the institutions and structures that have long supported research.

At the same time, scientists are being asked to engage with society in more visible and consequential ways. They must communicate across differences, collaborate beyond their fields, anticipate ethical implications, and understand how research intersects with lived experience. These are not peripheral responsibilities. They shape the questions scientists ask, the methods they choose, the partnerships they build, and the ways their discoveries are trusted and applied. Yet training systems have not kept pace. Too often, community engagement, ethical reasoning, and collaboration across disciplines are treated as additions to scientific training rather than as part of scientific excellence itself.

We cannot expect scientists to engage effectively with the societal implications of their work—or with the broad range of career paths they may pursue—if their education does not equip them to do so.

At the Dana Foundation, we see this as a strategic priority for neuroscience and for science more broadly. Our work is grounded in the belief that science must be ethically grounded, socially embedded, and connected to the communities it seeks to benefit.

Seeding New Models of Scientific Training

Through our Dana Centers for Neuroscience & Society and Dana NextGen program, we are working with institutional partners to explore what this can look like in practice. Each program is different, but together they point toward a larger shift: Scientific training must prepare people to generate new forms of knowledge across the continuum of discovery and applied research, while fostering an understanding of the society that knowledge will ultimately shape and affect.

At the University of California, Los Angeles, in collaboration with Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a new undergraduate minor in Neuroscience and Society has been developed to bring together neuroscience, social sciences, and the humanities. Students study neuroethics and science communication while engaging in community-based research, learning about brain function and how neuroscience is interpreted and applied in real-world settings.

At the University of California, Berkeley, the Neurotech Collider Lab integrates community perspectives directly into the neurotechnology design process. Students work in interdisciplinary teams with local stakeholders, including young people navigating mental health challenges. Their perspectives help shape the questions being asked and the solutions being developed. Community engagement is not a final step after the science is complete; it is part of how the work is imagined, tested, and improved.

At Virginia Tech, a program in experiential neuroengineering places lived experience at the center of training. Students begin with the science of traumatic brain injury, then move into clinical and community settings, working alongside care teams and individuals living with these conditions. In one case, this process led to the collaborative design of adaptive swim goggles with a community member. The product matters, but so does the process: students learn to see engineering as both technical work and human work.

A Systems Challenge for Science

These examples are not a finished blueprint. They are signals of where scientific education needs to go. They show that collaboration, ethical reasoning, communication, humility, and community responsiveness are not “soft skills.” They are rigorous professional competencies that can be taught, practiced, and strengthened across the scientific enterprise, including in discovery-driven research where understanding societal context and public values remains essential to responsible scientific progress.

This matters because many scientists will build careers beyond the traditional academic pathway—in industry, policy, education, communication, healthcare, public service, philanthropy, and other sectors where scientific knowledge meets social decision-making. In those settings, success depends on expertise and judgment: the ability to listen across perspectives, translate knowledge, think critically, anticipate consequences, and build trust.

For universities, research institutions, funders, and scientific organizations, this is a systems challenge. We cannot prepare scientists for a changing world by adding a few communication workshops to existing training models. We need incentives, curricula, mentorship, partnerships, and funding structures that recognize science-and-society capacities as central to science.

This is a call to strengthen scientific training. The future of science depends not only on what scientists know, but on how well they work within the human systems their discoveries affect. We have an opportunity now to build training models that reflect that reality, and to help ensure that science advances in ways that are both transformative and accountable to the society it seeks to serve.