How to rebuild trust in science?

For one week every summer, the density of brilliant minds in the south of Germany increases significantly: the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings together around 70 Nobel Laureates and more than 600 young scientists from all over the world.

I got invited as a representative of the machine learning ecosystem in Tübingen and the Cluster of Excellence “Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science.” Together with my colleagues from Cyber Valley, we showcased the science happening in and around the region as a science pitch. And as if taking the stage in front of Nobel Laureates didn’t add enough pressure, this was the challenge:

• You have 3 minutes.
• You have a stage on a boat.
• You have no slides.

Nobody trained us for this

To prepare, I had the opportunity to work with a vocal coach on my presentation style and my voice (if you’re in or around Tübingen, I highly recommend Wortfabrik). I find it quite striking that we scientists are expected to present our work confidently on stage but we almost never receive any formal training for it. A few things I took away from the coaching:

• Warm up your voice before you go on stage. There are plenty of helpful exercises online.
• Body posture matters more than you think. Stand with your shoulders back. Your head should be in one line with your chest and not stretched forward.
• Your voice should come from your belly. Not from your head, and not from your throat.

Rebuilding trust

Because the same day I spent with the Nobel Laureates they also had a panel discussion, it became the title of this post: How do we rebuild trust in science?

A few points stuck with me:

• Misinformation on social media makes it genuinely hard to tell valid scientific facts from AI-generated slop
• People tend to trust a person more than an institution
• Which means it’s on us scientists to actually go out and communicate, transparently

It’s both a blessing and a curse: as scientists we can get lost in the fast pace of discovery (I certainly do). Deadlines, papers, and (the best part) new results. But what is any of it worth if it never leaves your lab, or your bubble?

And who is going to push back on misinformation, if you’re the expert and you don’t say anything?

A recent Nature article looked at this and the numbers paint a more multi-layered picture: in the UK for example, trust in science hasn’t disappeared: 84% of people still say they trust science at least somewhat, and only 2% don’t trust it at all. What did change is how many say they trust science “a lot”, which fell from 63% in 2020 to 34% in 2026. Trust hasn’t disappeared. But people became more careful to believe everything they hear.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

Communicating honestly is the whole point. I see science communication as part of my job. It’s the mechanism that rebuilds trust in science. And I wish more people saw it that way. Here is the ending of my 3-minute pitch, that also highlights why I think trust in science matters more than ever right now:

We are humans: we have a brain and we like to think that we are intelligent. But it seems like AI is catching up. And sometimes, AI is already the one having the better ideas. And yet AI can also be spectacularly wrong and hallucinate facts. It lies to us. And it does that with confidence. It can write thousands of lines of code for me that look perfectly fine. Until I’ve spent hours debugging it and discover it did the wrong thing after all.

We might be standing at the edge of the biggest shift in how science is done.

If we are, then being able to explain our research isn’t a soft skill. It might be the whole point.