Introducing the 2024-25 preLights Ambassadors

It’s time to introduce our three new preLights Ambassadors! But not before extending a heartfelt thank you to the four Ambassadors who served last year: Jennifer Ann Black, Martin Estermann, Girish Kale and Juan Moriano Their dedication and contributions to help preLights expand as a platform for preprint discussions and community building has made a lasting impact. Fortunately, they have all agreed to stay involved and help the new Ambassadors on their way.

preLights Ambassadors 2024-25

Isabella Cisneros

NIH IRTA Postbaccalaureate Fellow, Bethesda, USA

As a preLights ambassador, my goal is to foster more collaborations and interactions between preLighters, the scientific community, and the science journalism community. I would like to encourage more scientists to contribute to preLights, whether as a one-time feature or as a contributor, and promote the importance of science communication both within academic and public-facing circles. Additionally, I aim to bring preLighters and science journalists together to explore different approaches to storytelling and to continue to diversify the mediums through which we tell these stories, such as through the recently developed spotLights. Overall, through these initiatives, I hope to bring more visibility to science communication efforts like ours and emphasize the importance of engaging with the public.

Chee Kiang (Ethan) Ewe

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Tel Aviv University, Israel

My goal for the coming year is to build on the spotLights interview series, highlighting early-career researchers behind the many excellent preprints we cover on preLights and revealing the behind-the-scenes stories of their research. As a postdoc, I understand firsthand that research doesn’t always follow a straightforward path, and experiments often don’t go as planned. These setbacks, challenges, and ups and downs rarely end up in the polished stories we publish. As preLights follows the paper’s journey from preprint to publication, I aim to uncover the project’s path from the initial idea to the preprint – including all the missteps, failed experiments, wrong hypotheses etc. – thereby bringing life back into the life sciences.

Shreya Pramanik

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, USA

My main goal as an ambassador is to help fellow scientists polish their presentation skills. There are many ways to make a presentation memorable – using props or analogies, interacting with the audience by asking questions or making the presentation a visual treat with scientific illustrations. I want to organize a science illustration workshop for early-career researchers so they can express their (preprinted) work through art.