Posted: 10/1/2025
Brock-Contreras advocates for science in Washington, D.C., trip
By Ronica Stromberg
Sara Brock-Contreras, a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, represented Nebraska while advocating for science funding in Washington, D.C., September 9-10, 2025.
Funded by the American Geophysical Union in the two-day trip, Brock-Contreras and 32 other scientists in the Earth and space sciences served as experts during the Sept. 10 Geosciences Congressional Visits Day. They prepared for these meetings with legislators and staffers through workshops Sept. 9.
Brock-Contreras said her experiences as the graduate research assistant for the statewide Know Your Well program and former program manager at the Groundwater Foundation proved useful in asking legislators to support or co-sponsor three of the six bills the American Geophysical Union identified as policy priorities.
She asked the legislators to support the Safeguard America's Leadership in the Earth and Space Sciences bill with the highest appropriations for science in the House and Senate fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills. She received an email Sept. 23 that the bill had passed the House with guardrail protections for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Air and Radiation, NASA's Science Mission Directorate and the National Science Foundation.
She spoke in meetings about the Weather Act Reauthorization Act that Republican Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska was cosponsoring. The act supports weather forecasting and emergency preparedness, ensuring staffing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Weather Service. It also authorizes the continuation of the National Integrated Drought Information System and the National Mesonet Program, both of which Nebraska takes part in.
While Brock-Contreras met mostly with legislative aides and the meetings went only 20 minutes, Flood’s legislative director, Evan Dean, spent about 30 minutes with her and she said that meeting went really well.
"He was already very familiar with the Know Your Well program that I run, and I think that's due to the work that Ann Briggs and Chittaranjan Ray do with the Nebraska Water Center," she said.
The act passed through the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee while Brock-Contreras was in D.C. and will be brought to the House floor for a vote.
Brock-Contreras also spoke with legislators about the Relieving Economic Strain to Enhance American Resilience and Competitiveness in Higher Education and Research Act, or RESEARCHER Act, aimed at studying how availability of funding affects graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and the resulting STEM workforce and developing related policies.
Brock-Contreras had no news on the RESEARCHER Act by September 30, the deadline for approving bills for the next fiscal year.
As the only scientist representing Nebraska, Brock-Contreras had been placed on a team with two scientists from Wyoming. They met face-to-face with Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, and she said that was a pleasant surprise. She had been prepared in the Sept. 9 workshops for limited time with policy makers.
"One of the key things that they talked about when doing the science policy messaging--and I had a little bit of this when I volunteered for a science policy action group in my undergrad--but it's 'Focus on the policies. Keep the politics out of the policies. Keep the politics out of the messaging,'" she said.
She focused on showing how cool her work was, she said, and how policy makers could support that by authorizing programs or appropriating funds. She said the meetings were productive and she learned much from the experience.
"It definitely gave me a lot more respect for and insight on how they draw storylines and make decisions with all of that information coming at them," she said. "Those staffers are just incredibly knowledgeable. And usually, they were very, very interested in hearing about our research and what we want to do. But yeah, how do you take all that and make a decision from it? How do you take all that and then go to a 100-person or 435-person body and get all those people then to agree on a decision?"
From one workshop panelist, she learned logic does not always prevail but people need to be satisfied with small wins. She said the whole experience will affect the way she communicates with members of Congress and their staff.
"They want to be part of a conversation, but I also need to be prepared with a 25-word punchy, to-the-point story ask and thank-you so that I can take 30 seconds of their time and then get out of their way so they can go to their next thing, but also somehow be memorable as I'm the middle of all the meetings they've had that day," she said.
In her brief meetings, she spoke less about the three AGU-supported bills with limited connections to Nebraska, those dealing with landslide preparedness, early warning systems for volcanoes and reducing earthquake hazards.
Brock-Contreras's research looks at how people engage with science and make decisions from that. She said policy is a type of decision being made and she would like to make science accessible to everyone. She stated plans to look into the American Geophysical Union's Local Science Partners, a program at the state level, which she expects to be more her speed.
"Those D.C. people have a lot of energy, and I was wiped after I came back," she said. "Again, because the focus was on the policies and I felt like I could have productive conversations and not have politics, left versus right, hanging over my head, it was really fun to work with people. And that's always just been the dream, is, 'How can I work with as many people as possible to make the world a little bit better place?'"
