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Mitch Ambrose during his undergraduate stay at CERN. Photo courtesy of Ambrose.

As a physics major at the University of Minnesota, Mitch Ambrose did research with a particle physics group on campus. When offered the chance to work at CERN for a summer, he enthusiastically agreed. Although he didn’t know it then, this would be an exceptional summer at the LHC: Physicists would announce the discovery of the Higgs boson.

“I was working on some very, very small piece of the machine that had nothing to do with the discovery, but it was still really awesome to be there for that,” Ambrose says. A highlight was seeing Peter Higgs, the particle’s namesake, whisked into the press conference by a security guard. 

As the physics community celebrated, Ambrose realized something about himself. He wasn’t that excited about what discovering the Higgs meant for science. But he was fascinated that so many countries had come together to build such a complex machine for so esoteric a purpose.

Mealtimes also got him thinking. “The CERN cafeteria is a really special place where you have all sorts of people from different cultures hanging out together, getting to know each other as people through this scientific endeavor,” he recalls. He started thinking about the management of science, international collaborations, and science diplomacy.

Not long after returning to Minnesota, Ambrose swapped a dreaded quantum class for a science policy class and interned with the Minnesota State Legislature. Those experiences convinced him that public policy was a better fit for him than research or teaching.

Wanting to jump straight into science policy after college, he found a two-year fellowship for recent graduates with the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI). STPI conducts studies for the National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and other federal agencies. Ambrose says the fellowship gave him a 30,000-foot view of the US federal science landscape. “It’s very decentralized—there are lots of different agencies that fund science.”

When that fellowship ended, he hit a fork in the road: go to grad school for policy or get another job? He decided to stay in DC a little longer and found a four-month internship with the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. “I really got a peek behind the curtain at the role of Congress in science policy; it’s totally different than the work I was doing at STPI,” he says. In contrast to working on large reports, the committee internship involved tasks like meeting with organizations to hear their requests, considering whom to invite to hearings, writing questions for hearings, and getting a sense of how Congress oversees science.

The internship ended before graduate school application season, so Ambrose took a job as a reporter for FYI, the science policy news service of the American Institute of Physics. Nine years later, he’s still there—now as director. He never did go to graduate school.

FYI is designed to help scientists understand and navigate Washington, although it also helps Washington understand science, Ambrose says. Readers are primarily scientists; people working in science policy; people at national labs, universities, and embassies; and students interested in science policy.

Every Monday, FYI publishes an issue that highlights what’s on deck for the week ahead and recaps big news from the prior week. The publication covers congressional hearings, advisory committee meetings for science agencies, and science-related legislation, reports, and funding. 

Ambrose spends lots of time following the formal ways by which the government makes decisions and sets priorities for science. That includes going elbows-deep into enormous PDF documents to make sense of the federal budget and share it with readers in a meaningful way.

His team—which includes a few reporters and an intern—doesn’t do advocacy work but instead aims to help scientists interpret policy developments and the mechanics behind Washington, Ambrose says. “We want to help people understand how you can have an impact.”

Check out FYI and sign up for its email newsletters at aip.org/fyi.