Careers in Humanitarian Science
…from the American Association for the Advancement of Science…
“One way or the other, most scientists do work that benefits society, even those who don’t think about it quite that way. Some direct their efforts toward enriching the bank of knowledge. Others work to make new medicines, or to create technologies that make work more efficient and the economy richer. Some with a medical degree even directly alleviate pain, taking care of one patient after another.
“But only a few scientists work directly and explicitly to improve the human condition on a wide scale.
“Lars Bromley … got his first exposure to the struggles of the outside world through the books he was reading as a teenager. “I grew up in a very small town in the middle of the United States, so we were as far as you could be from anything related to international affairs,” says Bromley, leader of the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, publisher of Science Careers). But when, after 7 years working on international environmental and developmental policy, he began researching human-rights violations in remote countries, he “was immediately so consumed with the human rights” that no other work seemed more important.”
