Why “My Research Is Too Technical” Is Costing You Opportunities

During his doctoral research, immunologist Joseph Sievert posted a one-minute video about his field to Instagram on a whim. He expected it to reach perhaps a few hundred people — the modest audience a researcher might hope for on a modest social media account. Instead, it accumulated more views in a single hour than all of his published research papers would ever accumulate in citations across their entire lifespan. Writing about that experience in STAT News in 2025, Sievert — now known as @dr.noc, with 3.5 million followers — identified the core lesson: the public is not uninterested in complex science. It is uninterested in science that has not been translated.

The belief that a research topic is too specialized, too technical, or too abstract for a general audience is the single most common reason BINUS lecturers give for not producing science communication content. It sounds responsible — a form of intellectual honesty about the gap between academic expertise and public literacy. But it conflates the complexity of a method with the accessibility of a finding. The methodology belongs in the journal article. The finding — what changed, what was discovered, and what it means for someone who didn’t spend three years conducting the research — is what belongs in public communication. No topic is inherently uncommunicable. What makes research feel impossible to explain to a general audience is usually the failure to separate those two things.

A 2025 study from the University of Cologne, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found that plain-language summaries of technical research increased both audience comprehension and researchers’ perceived credibility. Accessible presentation of findings made the scientist seem more trustworthy, not less authoritative. The fear that simplifying science will undermine a researcher’s academic standing is, the evidence suggests, precisely backward. The range of disciplines that BINUS researchers have already communicated publicly reinforces this point: BINUS authors have published opinion pieces in The Diplomat on defense strategy, in 360Info on Islamic cinema and military drone policy, in Kompas.id on AI ethics, and in War on the Rocks on Indo-Pacific security architecture. These are not simple topics. Their authors understood that complexity is a translation problem, not a communication barrier — and that the solution is a clearer opening sentence, not silence.

The @dr.noc case is particularly instructive precisely because immunology is, on paper, one of the least accessible fields a general audience might encounter. Sievert’s channel now reaches between 30 and 50 million viewers per month organically — not because his audience is unusually scientifically literate, but because he builds trust before he deploys data. As he wrote in STAT News, “a scientific message will not resonate unless viewers have a clear reason to care about the issue and, more importantly, to trust the messenger.” Technical depth follows that connection. It does not replace it. This is a production principle, not a dumbing-down concession, and it applies equally to an Instagram carousel and a 750-word op-ed.

The BINUS Science Communication page already provides an AI-assisted workflow specifically designed for this translation step: paste your abstract into the AI prompt, generate accessible copy, design in Canva, and post with the correct hashtag. The step most lecturers skip is not the production — it is the decision to start. If you have a paper in EPDP that has never generated a public-facing post because the topic feels too technical, that belief is the only barrier in your way. RTT’s Downstreaming team runs quarterly content creation sessions and can work with you one-on-one to move from paper to post on whatever topic you research, regardless of how specialized the field.

For the full tools, formats, and workflow that make science communication achievable for any research topic, visit the BINUS Science Communication page at http://binus.ac.id/techtransfer/science-communication.

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