Science – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Making Medical Doctors: Science & Medicine at Vanderbilt since Flexner

By Scott J. Pearson | March 25, 2025March 25, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This book is nearly forty years old, and like any forty-year-old history, it deserves an update. But like any good forty-year-old history, the stories that are told still transmit knowledge and wisdom. As a Vanderbilt Medical Center employee, I found the history of the medical center’s refounding in 1925 enlightening as it set a direction that continues to this day. Before the era of government-funded biomedical research, most research was funded by private endowments from…

Science Writing-Communication

Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A Guide to Effective Engagement

By Scott J. Pearson | February 27, 2025February 27, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

The young field of science communication has developed to address the gap between academic science and local communities. Scientific knowledge has explained most natural process, but some mastered processes remain unexplained to individuals in the community. Instead of just relying on overcommitted professors, scientists with interests in communications have begun careers specifically to fill the gap. In this book, Faith Kearns describes this emerging field’s evolution, challenges, and speculative future. One common misconception contends that…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare Science

What’s Past is Prologue: The Personal Stories of Women in Science at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

By Scott J. Pearson | February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

“What’s past is prologue; what’s to come, in yours and my discharge,” wrote Shakespeare centuries ago in The Tempest. For the most part, women have been excluded from the enterprise of biomedical research throughout history. However, that practice has been changing in recent decades, and the trend will likely continue in coming decades. The challenge is mostly obvious: How can a woman balance a career demanding high performance with a fulfilling personal life, often with…

Presentation Visualization

Visual Explanations: Images & Quantities, Evidence & Narrative

By Scott J. Pearson | January 19, 2025January 19, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” so the saying goes. Thus, an effective visualization, enriched by information, must count for so much more. But a misconstrued visualization, unfortunately, can lead to horrific outcomes from misinterpretations. How can we refine our visual thinking so that we can infer correct deductions while ignoring misplaced sketches? Visualization guru Edward Tufte teaches us how to reason about our world through informative displays in this helpful guide, replete with…

Presentation Visualization

Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte

By Scott J. Pearson | January 12, 2025January 12, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

All the way back to Galileo sharing about Jupiter’s moons, science has relied upon visualizations to communicate its findings. Some things are just better depicted visually instead of through words. In contemporary society, information graphics have played an increasingly larger role as computers quickly translate data into a more accessible format. Newspapers and Internet websites have made them commonplace. Even though this book was written in 1990, before ubiquitous computing, it identifies the philosophical and…

Presentation Visualization

Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte

By Scott J. Pearson | December 30, 2024December 30, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Edward Tufte’s books on data visualization are nothing short of legend among us information geeks. A political scientist by training, he demonstrates how well-conceived visualizations can effectively communicate insights and how shortcomings can create catastrophes. He continues his famous series on visual imagination with this book on the intersection of data and art. He shows how displays of evidence can move readers much like art and how poorly constructed displays can inhibit good judgment. Tufte’s…

Management-Business Science

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science

By Scott J. Pearson | November 28, 2024November 28, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Most problems that contemporary society faces require experts from more than one discipline to explore them through research. Traditional fields of knowledge have become so subspecialized that teams, not individuals, are now the units to advance knowledge. Yet institutions and individuals are usually poorly equipped and organized to address these challenges. They often still exist in a dated mindset where different spheres of knowledge exist in hierarchies, not collaborative networks. The National Academies in the…

Indie Management-Business Science

NeuroSelling: Mastering the Customer Conversation Using the Surprising Science of Decision Making

By Scott J. Pearson | September 29, 2024September 29, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

This book is directed to help sales professionals excel at their job, and it takes an unusual perspective to get there. It teaches modern neuroscience from knowledge emerging from scientific labs and applies it to the art of a customer relationship. …And it does a surprisingly effective job in my estimation. In my scientific education, I know that the brain has been a moving frontier for the first quarter of this century, and research is…

Biography-Memoir Leadership Science

Breaking Through: My Life in Science

By Scott J. Pearson | August 30, 2024September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

First, who is Katalin Karikó? She is the primary scientist who showed how mRNA can be synthesized to create a vaccine. Why is that important? This technology enabled the COVID19 vaccines, which recently carried the world out of a pandemic. So Karikó’s impact and legacy are tremendous. What’s more is that she has a meaningful, inspiring life story that overcame the odds both in her native Hungary and in the halls of academe in America’s…