When it came time for the midterm elections in 2022, the University of Michigan showed up. Its student body — both undergraduate and graduate students — had the highest election turnout the campus had ever seen.

Elana Goldenkoff (MVS ’18), who recently defended her PhD in kinesiology, certainly doesn’t take credit for this achievement, but she is thrilled to know she played a part.

A couple years earlier, she had read that students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics tend to vote at lower rates than students in the social sciences and humanities. The disparity didn’t sit right with her — and she was troubled at hearing friends tell her they didn’t plan to vote.

So she began working with a few campus groups to do some targeted outreach and to promote voter registration among STEM students. To bring the message home in 2022, she launched Science at the Ballot Box, a campaign designed to encourage STEM students to think about civic engagement, voting and democracy, and about how science and policy interrelate.

“I was really proud of that,” she says.

Science policy has long held a draw for Goldenkoff. She strongly believes that there should be more scientists in government, both as elected officials and behind the scenes, as well as in the nonprofit sector.

As the world gets increasingly complex, being able to straddle the worlds of science and policy grows ever more important, she says.

“There are so many challenges we are currently facing in areas like climate change, artificial intelligence, and public health that are very much at the intersection of scientific expertise and public welfare,” she says.

That is the sweet spot Goldenkoff is aiming for in her own career.

How she got here

Goldenkoff grew up in Fairfax, Va., in a family that placed a significant focus on education — her mom was an elementary school principal, and her grandmothers were a teacher and a librarian. She caught the neuroscience bug in high school; reading several books by Oliver Sacks about the brain got her own brain swirling with thoughts about “why we are the way we are and why we do the things we do.”  

As a neuroscience undergraduate at U-M, she started out in a lab that studied flies but realized she didn’t connect with cellular work in animal models. Instead, she found herself gravitating toward working with humans.

Once she transferred to the School of Kinesiology her junior year to major in movement science, she focused on intraoperative neuromonitoring, a suite of techniques used to monitor the brain and spinal cord in patients undergoing surgery to ensure these organs don’t get damaged.

For graduate school, Goldenkoff says she “lucked out.”

Assistant movement science professor Michael Vesia had just arrived at U-M to launch the Brain Behavior Laboratory, and he was looking for a graduate student who could apply the techniques Goldenkoff had learned as an undergraduate.  

“It worked out perfectly,” she says. “I was able to apply those skills in a research setting rather than a clinical one.”

She signed on for a PhD with Vesia to investigate the motor control networks in the brain with the help of a brain activation method called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Ultimately, that knowledge could be used to improve rehabilitation techniques for hand movement in people who have experienced a stroke or have other neurological impairments.

“I really appreciated the societal implications,” she says. “I really do think that in general, science should be used for the public good — especially if we are getting public dollars to do it.”

But soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Between the ensuing shutdown and her research group’s move to a new building, Goldenkoff’s new lab turned out to be largely inaccessible for more than a year.

As she watched the world convulse with panic and uncertainty, she was struck by how the global public health emergency brought out peoples’ distrust in science — and on the flip side, how poorly scientists communicated crucial information about important issues such as masks and vaccines.

Meanwhile, the downtime gave her an opportunity to delve into her policy interests. To explore the societal dimensions of all that she saw, she joined an association called the National Science Policy Network, becoming an active member of the group’s Diplomacy and Advocacy committees. She quickly found herself engaging with and learning from early-career scientists across different disciplines who were pursuing careers in policy.

“I always knew this was an interest of mine, but I didn’t really know what the full range of options were,” she says. “So it was a really good introduction to what this path might look like for me for the next couple years.”

Through the organization, Goldenkoff embarked on an internship working with the Office of Science and Technology at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

In that role, she worked on research about how immigrant and emigrant scientists around the world contribute to cultural diplomacy. The project provided the opportunity to gain valuable experience with a different set of research skills than ones she was mastering in the lab, such as conducting semi-structured interviews, analyzing quantitative data, and writing policy reports.

Increasingly convinced that her path lay not in academic research but in science policy, she recently completed the Science, Technology, and Public Policy graduate certificate program through the Ford School of Public Policy. She is also contributing to a National Science Foundation-funded project investigating how engineering students navigate the ethical responsibilities of their chosen profession and how they view societally complex issues such as artificial intelligence.

Where she’s going

Goldenkoff is still debating her next steps. She is not yet sure where exactly her science policy path will take her, but she is clear-eyed about the values she intends to espouse as her professional life unfolds.

“I’d love to help rehabilitate the trust between the public, scientists, and the government,” she says, “and really, to use science to promote public good and social change and to participate in creating an equitable and just world.”