Faculty on Social Media: Friend or Foe?

IN ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR videos on Roarke Horstmeyer’s YouTube channel, he explains the difference between an analog microscope and a digital microscope in less than 12 seconds.

“This is an analog microscope,” Horstmeyer says, gesturing to a standard—if sleek—simple microscope.

Then he pulls out his iPhone and plops the camera lens against that same microscope’s eye piece. “And this is a digital microscope.”

An assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, Horstmeyer develops microscopes, cameras and computer algorithms for applications ranging from detecting neural activity deep within tissue to studying the behavior of model organisms like zebrafish. But in his free time, he’s been steadily building up a social media presence—specifically on YouTube and TikTok.

“I wanted to find a new way to get people engaged with my lab and show the work that we can accomplish with the imaging tools we make,” said Horstmeyer. “But it always surprises me which videos find an audience, because they aren’t always the clips I spend a lot of time on.”

The topics in his videos are as varied as the imaging tools he makes. In one, Horstmeyer demonstrates how floating optics tables help ensure that experiments stay stable. In another, he zooms in on zebrafish embryos to show how the microscopes his lab develops can capture an unprecedented amount of detail. He even recorded a video to see if he could find any microscopic bugs in a slice of strawberry (thankfully, he did not).

Although Horstmeyer had previously dabbled in social media, he made a concerted effort to create more engaging content after participating in Duke Creator Lab’s “Thought Leader Studio,” led by Aaron Dinin, a faculty member in Duke’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship program. Dinin previously made headlines for his innovative classes centered on social media and content production—dubbed “TikTok classes” by Duke students. When Jerry Lynch, the Vinik Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, approached him about creating a class to help faculty build these same skills, Dinin jumped at the opportunity.

“These faculty are pursuing projects that provide incredible value to the world, but they need to share that knowledge and those tools as broadly as possible,” said Dinin. “You can cure cancer, but you also should make sure the world knows you can cure cancer.”

Reaching New Audiences

Although researchers will often publish a paper and publicize it within their academic community, they don’t usually make an attempt to share it with a wider audience. This is where Dinin believes social media can broaden the impact of their work.

“Bringing knowledge into the world should always be the primary goal,” said Dinin. “No matter how popular a journal is, you’re going to reach more people with a bad TikTok in 10 minutes than a journal could reach over a month. If your goal is to share your work with a broad audience, then you should also use tools that are actually able to reach that audience.”

And the size of that audience is staggering. Today, more than five billion people around the globe use some form of social media. Roughly three billion people use Facebook. Instagram boasts more than 1.6 billion users. More than 1 billion people have LinkedIn profiles. X, the platform previously known as Twitter, reports 368 million monthly active users. And according to the Pew Research Center, roughly 170 million Americans use TikTok—just a portion of the more than 1.5 billion global users of the app.

That isn’t to say that all faculty in Duke Engineering need to amass millions of followers. Instead, Dinin used the Thought Leaders program to help interested researchers develop a personal brand that would help them appeal to their targeted communities. From there, faculty learned how to create attention-grabbing content that could quickly attract and hold a viewer’s mind, and what methods could help the all-powerful algorithms prioritize and highlight their work.

“At the end of the day, someone is going to talk about augmented reality headsets, and it could either be a 19-year-old who’s using ChatGPT to make a script, or it could be Duke Professor Maria Gorlatova, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the technology,” Dinin said. “There is an audience inside those billions of users who want to learn about these topics, and if you’re an expert, you should be thinking about how you can reach and engage with them.”

But getting started is half the work.

Ken Brown, the Michael J. Fitzpatrick Distinguished Professor of Engineering, had previously used Twitter/X to share research papers, student news from his lab in the electrical and computer engineering department, and job openings. Even he admits that these initial posts were done to appease his program director rather than out of a genuine interest in cultivating a social media presence. But as he began to post more, Brown discovered a quantum computing niche within the larger “Academic Twitter” world.

Horstmeyer noticed something similar happening as he started making more videos. Now, he estimates that he spends at least four hours a week making content. It’s a significant chunk of time when you consider that he’s also teaching classes, grading papers, assisting his graduate students and doing his best to maintain a work-life balance. But when asked if he thinks the clips are worth the time and effort, Horstmeyer’s answer is immediate.

Definitely.

“I’ve had people working in optics or even who are just interested in the field reach out to me because they saw one of my videos and thought it was fun and they wanted to know more about what we do,” he said. “It’s also been an easy conversation starter at conferences. Students will introduce themselves and say they found out about my lab because one of my videos appeared in their YouTube Shorts or on TikTok.”

“Researchers who I’ve known for a long time have reached out and inquired about potential collaborations just from seeing our videos,” said Amanda Randles, the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke. Randles and her lab use high-performance computational tools to create simulations that model blood flow and the movement of cancerous cells through the body. While this work had already garnered Randles significant attention in both biomedical and computational circles, Dinin helped her and her team learn how to package their research into short, palatable videos.

“I keep track of my social media on a spreadsheet, and you can see a significant spike in followers and interactions each time we post a video,” she said. “It’s made us think about more ways we can present our work. We’re thinking of how we can make short videos to summarize new research papers, and I’m already making content for our newly launched Center for Computational Medicine.”

Faculty aren’t the only ones seeing the benefit from a more engaged social media presence. One of Brown’s postdoctoral fellows contacted him about joining the lab specifically because they saw his job advertisement on X. Daniel Shapiro, a biomedical engineering PhD student at Duke, finds that it’s sometimes easier—and faster—to connect with faculty, researchers in industry and even potential investors on platforms like X or LinkedIn.

“You can have the smallest interaction, like a comment on a post, but there is a greater likelihood that you’ll be seen and noticed on that platform than one of the thousand people in their inbox every day,” he said. “I’m interested in going the entrepreneurial route after graduation, and these sites are incredibly useful to get your foot in the door.”

Online Exposure–For Better and For Worse

Shapiro has been able to use social media platforms to find fellowships, network with scientists and entrepreneurs, and keep track of publications that relate to his research. But he’s also taken precautionary measures to ensure he doesn’t spend too much time in the virtual world.

“I don’t have the apps on my phone because it’s so easy to sit down and scroll for hours and hours. The apps are engineered to keep your attention,” said Shapiro. “The most successful people are often elevated by the algorithms, so you see them a lot. It’s very easy to get stuck comparing yourself and worrying about your accomplishments. You need to remind yourself when to take a step back.”

“There are two things that I try to protect at all times—my time and attention,” echoed Brown. It’s this mantra that recently led him to take a step back from X. He still plans to post his research papers and job openings, but he wants to otherwise limit his engagement with the site, at least for the time being.

“The quantum community that was on X basically crashed when the platform changed leadership in 2022, and the sad thing for me is that I haven’t seen anything take its place. Our community was very diverse, but as X underwent changes, the platform felt like it got much more antagonistic.” – Ken Brown

Brown isn’t wrong. According to data collected from the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, the daily use of hateful speech nearly doubled after Twitter was sold in 2022. Many who fled X have since landed on LinkedIn and Threads, a platform that spun out through Instagram, but some communities are cautiously returning to X as it stabilizes.

Dinin fully recognizes the problems associated with social media platforms and their role in the ever-growing spread of misinformation. But these issues, he says, make it even more important for experts to effectively take advantage of these applications.

“It isn’t for us to say whether these platforms are good or bad. Social media isn’t going away, so we need to learn how to operate these tools, even with these constraints,” he said. “You can draw a straight line from the printing press to Walt Whitman writing poems and editorials
to YouTube and TikTok. It’s just the next iteration of publication, and once you recognize that, you can recognize the opportunities we have at our fingertips.”