UPR Show About Science, 'UnDisciplined,' Celebrates 300th Episode

LOGAN — On the afternoon of July 6, 2018, listeners tuned into Utah Public Radio heard a few bubbly bars of a song called "Little Idea" for the first time.

Since then, that song has played at the beginning of each episode of UnDisciplined, UPR's award-winning weekly program on science and discovery. And at the end of each program, the show's founding producer and host, Matthew LaPlante, asks listeners to "go have big ideas."

On Thursday, UnDisciplined will broadcast its 300th episode.

"We've had something in the neighborhood of 425 guests during that time," LaPlante said. "We've had everything from A to Z, from agrobiology to zoonotic pathology. We’ve done episodes of the physics of fried rice, the world's deadliest animals and sending bugs to outer space."

The program is broadcast on Thursday mornings on UPR and published as a podcast. In every episode, LaPlante says he tries to help listeners feel the same sense of awe he feels when he's recording interviews in the ramshackle recording studio he built into an old wine cellar in his basement.

"It's actually not that hard to achieve that goal — to get listeners to arrive at awe," said LaPlante, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Utah State University. "By and large, people love to be wowed, and they love science."

It might not seem that way sometimes — especially lately, as tens of billions of dollars in research funding has been frozen or canceled, thousands of scientists have been laid off, and new restrictions have been placed on research.

"But in public opinion polls, Americans still overwhelmingly say that they have a lot of trust in science and scientists," LaPlante said.

Indeed, in a Pew Research Center survey of nearly 9,600 U.S. adults conducted in October, 76% of respondents expressed confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests, and strong majorities view research scientists as intelligent and focused on solving real-world problems.

"So, it's easy to wonder what the disconnect is — how can an enterprise that seems to have such robust support from Americans be on the losing side of policy decisions right now?" LaPlante asked.

One clue in the Pew poll: Only 45% of U.S. adults describe scientists as "good communicators" and nearly half said that scientists "feel superior" to others.

"It doesn't have to be that way," LaPlante said.

That's a lesson LaPlante learned in the first year of hosting the show.

When UnDisciplined started, each episode featured a segment in which two scientists from very different disciplines would have a conversation about their lives.

"The first episode had an ecologist and an economist," LaPlante said. "The next week we had a plant physiologist and a political scientist. The week after that we had an anthropologist and an aerospace engineer. And one of the things we learned that is sort of counterintuitive is that when scholars are talking to other scholars, but those people are from outside of their field of study, there is a simultaneous acknowledgment of the intelligence of the other person, but also a recognition that they need to be accessible. And so, we'd have these really beautiful, very smart but also very comprehensible conversations."

When the program's format shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic to include a longer form interview with just one guest, LaPlante said he made a point to prep his guests by asking them to speak to the audience "like you're speaking to someone who has a Ph.D. in a subject that is different from yours."

"We don't dumb things down," LaPlante said. "What we do is we acknowledge that, for instance, my mechanic has a doctoral-level understanding of cars, and my boxing coach has a doctoral-level understanding of what happens inside the ring. Everybody is absolutely brilliant at something, and when we simply talk to smart people like they are smart people, big ideas happen."

In addition to being a vehicle to share science news, the program has played a big role in the careers of many of the people who have been involved in its production.

Alyssa Roberts was an undergraduate studying journalism at USU when she became the program's first producer. She is now the digital executive producer at Channel 13 News in Las Vegas.

"Editing radio was such good training for television," she said. "It's actually harder to edit just audio. It's a lot. Because on television, if something is missing, we can cut in a visual, I can distract you with a picture. In radio, if the edit is bad, you're going to know."

When the program's second producer, USU journalism student Naomi Ward, began her tenure at UnDisciplined, she also faced challenges.

"I felt really intimidated by not thinking that I could do anything related to STEM because I had never felt like I was good at math or science or that it came naturally to me," she said.

Now, Ward is the communications coordinator for the MATHCOUNTS Foundation, a nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia, that provides extracurricular math programming for hundreds of thousands of students annually.

The program's third producer, USU journalism student Clayre Scott, is now a producer and anchor at KSL News Radio in Salt Lake City. She said that her experience at UPR was "everything" when it came to preparing for a future career in radio. "I don't think I would have gotten the job I did without the audio experience I had working with UPR and working on UnDisciplined," she said.

Shortly after launching the program, LaPlante began studying for a Ph.D. in climate science. "And I'm honestly not sure I wouldn't have been so eager to do if I wasn't having so much fun talking to other scientists and seeing how much joy they derived from their explorations of our world."

During the first two years of that program of study, LaPlante was assisted by interim hosts Nalini Nadkarni and Shoshannah Buxbaum. Nadkarni is now the host of a weekly segment on KUER in Salt Lake City called TreeNote. Buxbaum is a producer for the nation's most popular science-themed radio show.

"And truly, without this experience, I would not be at Science Friday," Buxbaum said.

LaPlante, who recently completed his doctoral studies and has authored several studies on climate variability and prediction, said he's planning to reassess the program's future once the current producer, Raegan Edelman, is ready to move on.

"We've always taken it one week at a time," he said. "There's certainly no end to the interesting science we can talk about, though, so we might still be on the air 300 episodes from now and 300 episodes after that. There are always more big ideas."