YSPH professor discusses value of social media in academia

Ijeoma Opara has demonstrated how effective she is at social media as an associate professor of social & behavioral studies at the Yale School of Public Health. In January, she brought Bobbi Wilson – the 9-year-old girl who was racially profiled last fall while collecting specimens of the invasive spotted lanternfly in her New Jersey neighborhood – to Yale to honor her. She used social media to spread the news, generating local, national, and international headlines in the process.

In June, she got the chance to share her social media knowledge with peers halfway around the globe.

Opara traveled to Uganda to participate in the 2023 Forum on Child and Adolescent Global Health Research and Capacity Building, held June 19-27 in Kampala and Masaka. Her June 22 presentation in Masaka was titled “Using Social Media as an Academic.”

“It’s a topic that I get asked about a lot, given my success on social media, and I have done similar trainings on the topic with different groups,” she said.

“I specifically talked about Twitter and the success I have had on it,” Opara said. She also explained how beneficial social media can be for early career faculty, postdocs, and students who are trying to expand their networks and meet collaborators. “There is a benefit to sharing your work to make an impact,” she said. “There’s a lot of untapped potential with social media.”

The forum was presented by the International Center for Child Health and Development (ICHAD) of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, which is headquartered in both St. Louis and Masaka. Opara was invited because of her connections to ICHAD. The center houses many National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded training programs for early-career faculty, and she’s a 2021 alumna of one of these programs, on researcher resiliency training.

Opara stressed to attendees several factors that contribute to social media success, some of which apply to people outside academia as well:

• “First, think about your narrative for your work. Anything you post or tweet should ideally reflect that narrative.”

• “Work to build a social media community based on your expertise. It’s a great way to have a collective space of different researchers, practitioners, activists, and scholars in your field. And understand that social media isn’t for everyone. If you have an aversion to being so public, there are other ways to make an impact and get your work out there, so don’t feel pressure to join.”

• “Share your research using fun, innovative strategies, such as infographics, in order to reach the lay audience and to make your research more digestible.”

• “Remember that at the end of the day, social media is a great way to showcase your work. You do not have to talk about yourselves all the time or share personal details about your life. Think about the bigger picture, which is to share the awesome and impactful work that we are all doing to inspire and have a larger reach.”

Opara called her time in Uganda “a life-changing experience.” The forum brought together ICHAD leaders, staff, Ugandan policymakers, and scholars from around the world. She

visited the Rakai Health Sciences Program, which was founded after the first HIV case in Uganda was discovered, and where researchers are working extensively on HIV treatment.

In addition, she got to visit schools and meet children, and she also met with some Yale students who were working on the Yale-Uganda program initiative. Among them were Debbie Dada, a 2022 Applebaum Award winner who is doing research as a Downs Fellow; and Matthew Ponticello, an MD-PhD student at YSPH and the Yale School of Medicine.

The trip also opened Opara’s eyes about possibly doing global health work in Uganda and Nigeria, the home country of her late parents. She said she took away some knowledge from the forum that she plans to bring back to her SASH Lab at YSPH. She also plans to learn more about getting involved with the Yale Africa Initiative.

“After visiting and meeting so many African scholars and meeting kids who were directly impacted by the work,” she said, “I felt that someone like me, a child of Nigerian immigrants, has to figure out a way to give back and be a part of delivering sustainable prevention programming to the continent.”