Bloomington highlights: Meet the IU senior behind Science on Tap

Sean Buehler, an IU senior majoring in community health, is the creator of Science on Tap, a Bloomington-based educational outreach program which meets for two hours once a month for lectures on various scientific topics.

This month’s lecture, the third of the project series, will take place tonight at 7pm, and it will focus primarily on the science behind the creation of beer.

How did your organization get started? Where did the idea come from?

We base our model off of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, who hosts a similar program called Science Café. I happened to stumble upon their podcast about a year ago—so, November of 2015—and after listening to it for a few months, I thought, “Wow, this would be a really great thing to try to start at IU!” and I started the process in January.

Who have you collaborated with so far?

So in terms of involvement, I like to refer to Science on Tap as “the royal ‘we’”—right now it’s just me running it! But I have been reaching out to people and we’re gonna start getting more student involvement once 2017 rolls around. It was just easier for the first few months to kinda keep everything in one mind.

In terms of the people who are showing up, we have everyone from undergrads to graduate students to people from the community that have no affiliation with Indiana University, which is exactly what we wanted. And in terms of speaker involvement, so far we’ve had two professors from Indiana University, a PhD student, and then coming up this month, we have business people from the community that work in the beer industry or for breweries.

So how do you go about reaching out to those people? What’s your connection to them?

For the first speaker series, I reached out to one of my former professors who’s in the psychology department, because I knew she’d be a great fit. She then reached out to some of her colleagues to see if any of them would tag along.

For the second series, I just sent out a mass chain email to the entire astronomy department to see if any of them were interested in speaking, and I had a PhD student step up.

For the third one that’s coming up, it happened totally organically—I had someone from the audience come up to me saying, “Hey, my friend Aaron is really into beer science. He actually studies it as his PhD thesis—let’s talk.” So I reached out to Aaron, and he got me in touch with everyone else. So now it’s starting to happen organically, which I hope continues to happen!

What do you hope that the lasting impact on the community and on those who become involved in this project will be?

I hope it becomes a staple of everyone’s month, in that they know that, once a month, they can go kick back with a beer and learn something new outside of the classroom. So there’s no incentive to come to Science on Tap, there’s no point other than to come have a beer, grab some food, hang with friends and learn—we’re trying to keep the topics sexy, if you will, topics that are either culturally relevant or interesting to people. Psychology is always interesting, astronomy, beer… we have poisons in December and then in the Spring we’re trying to get a sexual education one—Debbie Herbenick [a professor in the Kinsey Institute at IU] is a great professor, we’re trying to get her on board.

We’re trying to keep things interesting, but we want to this to be a staple of everyone’s month. It’s like, “Oh, what are you doing this Tuesday?” “Oh, that’s Science on Tap Tuesday! We’ve got to go!”

We’re getting a hundred people there each event already, which is double our expectations at this point. And we’re starting to reach capacity issues at some of the places we’ve been going to, but it’s great. I mean, that’s a good problem to have.

I remember you saying at the lecture in September that there was a possible merger in the future. Can you talk a little more about that?

Science Café is a pre-existing program here in Bloomington [not the aforementioned Science Café at University of Nebraska] that’s been running a similar type deal for the last four years—their program is a little more academically focused in that they have higher level presentations, more specific thesis-based presentations, where I wanted Science on Tap to be a lot more layman’s, a lot more basic, so someone that’s an art major could come to learn about astronomy and walk away knowing something.

So we’re going to be absorbing Science Café, their resources, their themes, and hopefully their partnership with IU Themester, so that, for the 2017-18 school year, we can blow up and hopefully get some IU support behind our program.

Beyond that, do you have any future plans or hopes for expansion of the project? 

In December—we’ll be taking November off as a transition month—we’re actually moving to Function Brewing, and we’ll be at Function Brewing for all of our winter months. So basically November through March of each year, we’ll do that.

We’re looking to expand to more breweries and try to reach out to different community members. We want to try to get some community organizations on board to do some sponsorship events—so maybe find a charity that has to do with education, sponsor a talk about elementary education or something like that.

Those are our current goals, and we’ve already reached some of our other goals. We’re now partnered with WFHB, the local radio station, to produce a podcast of each event called “Standing Room Only,” which is really exciting. Next year I’ll be graduating, and it looks like I’ll be heading to Indianapolis for a year before I hopefully go on to med school, and my idea is that I’d like to have a Science on Tap Indianapolis, because there are so many people there that’d be into it, as well as the Science on Tap Bloomington. I’d love for this to become a multi-city deal.

Be sure to check out the next Science on Tap lecture this coming Tuesday.