Dominique Brossard’s upbringing gave her a unique perspective on the ideological divides that today seem to animate much of public life.
“My approach as a scholar really grew from early life experience, because I grew up all around the world,” says Brossard, a science communication scholar who co-runs the Science Communication Incubator Lab (SCI Lab), which conducts research on the social implications of scientific research and connects those implications to practice. Housed at Morgridge, the lab is a joint initiative between the institute and UW–Madison Life Science Communication, Brossard’s two campus homes.
“I was born in Argentina, then moved to Nicaragua and Ethiopia, spent my teenage years in Uruguay, and then nine years in France before coming to Madison as a faculty member,” she says. “It was always eye-opening to me that something that’s considered conservative in one country can be seen as liberal in another one.”
That perspective, coupled with her dual degrees in life sciences and social sciences, has pushed Brossard to think past those divides, to attempt to discover the things that unite people.
“There’s a clash of values in this country that end up being polarizing because we have never taken the time to find what unites people instead of focusing on makes them different,” Brossard says. “What we strive to do in the SCI Lab is explore innovative ways to actually break those walls that society has put between different groups of people.”
The SCI Lab, now in its third year at the Morgridge Institute, is a unique pursuit for a basic research institute. It’s designed to provide intellectual leadership on evidence-based strategies and tools for effective science communication. It’s helping Morgridge and UW–Madison scientists engage in meaningful discussions with communities across Wisconsin, the U.S., and beyond about what society expects from science.
These are existential issues today for American science, whose survival depends on society’s perception that scientists serve the greater public good. Those perceptions have taken a hit recently, spurred by deep skepticism about the public health response to the COVID pandemic. But fortunately, those perceptions are improving.
A 2026 annual survey produced by the Pew Research Center, which covers American perceptions of science, found that 61% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society, up slightly from 57% in 2023. That number is still lower, however, than the 73% of U.S. adults who said this in 2019, prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But controversy and discord over emerging technologies in science has been a near constant in recent decades, on topics like stem cell science, cloning, gene editing, brain organoids and genetically modified foods.
Today, the most all-encompassing challenge centers around artificial intelligence and its impact on the accuracy and integrity of research.
“What we strive to do in the SCI Lab is explore innovative ways to actually break those walls that society has put between different groups of people.” Dominique Brossard
The lab has ongoing studies on the phenomenon of hallucinations coming from AI on scientific queries. These represent a distinct new form of misinformation in science, where AI can invent or confabulate studies to support a conclusion and even generate URLs that don’t exist. A 2026 study published in The Lancet found that in 2023, about one in 2,800 scientific papers contained fabricated references generated by AI. In the first two months of 2026, that figure rose to one in 277.
Brossard and her SCI Lab colleagues are just beginning a project with Morgridge Investigator Ron Stewart to survey biomedical researchers across the United States about how AI impacts their science, from generating ideas to conducting experiments. “We’re developing the instrument where we break the scientific process into different stages, to actually see where AI is integrated and how people feel about it,” she says.
They also plan to identify the top dozen or so journals recognized as the most rigorous research for the biomedical field. From there, they plan to use Web of Science, a science citation indexing service, to identify some authors who are clearly incorporating AI into their work, along with randomly selected scientists.
To Brossard, AI is one of the classic examples of how scientists respond when transformational technologies arise. “Scientists tend to just dive in, and they may not know what they’re doing, but they’re curious.”
Another recent project, funded by the Wisconsin Legislature and the Public Service Commission, examines perceptions of nuclear energy in Wisconsin and the potential for new ventures. The project, directed by Paul Wilson in the Nuclear Physics Department, seeks to provide data-driven insights regarding Wisconsin’s energy future.
Nuclear power happens to be an interesting test case for how both technologies and perceptions evolve over time. Nuclear energy used to be loathed by many Democrats, especially older members of the party whose ideas were cemented in part by the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island catastrophes. Those views have slowly started to change.
“What we’ve seen, interestingly enough, is nuclear energy having a revival in part because of climate change,” Brossard says. “If you ask a 30-year-old today how they feel about nuclear energy, they may tell you Earth is going down the tubes and nuclear energy could be a good short-term solution until we have better options.”
The technology also has changed dramatically compared to the massive plants built in the 60s and 70s, imposing structures with huge cooling needs. Developments today include small modular reactors and micro-reactors that can provide energy to a bunch of government buildings or a small village.
Brossard stresses that efforts like these need to reach communities that are often not in the “official” decision-making pipeline, including everyday citizens, religious communities, labor unions and rural populations.
“As we say, we have to find that rock where we can all stand together, because we share the same world,” Brossard says.