Interview with Todd Boyette

In this edition of FOCUS in Sound, we meet Dr. Todd Boyette, who is the director of the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More importantly for our purposes on this program, he is also one of the co-founders of the North Carolina Science Festival, an annual event strongly supported for many years by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

Transcription of “Interview with Todd Boyette”

00;00;00;10 – 00;00;12;13
Ernie Hood
Welcome to Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host science writer Ernie Hood.

00;00;14;29 – 00;00;39;19
Ernie Hood
In this edition of Focus In Sound, we meet Dr. Todd Boyette, who is the director of the Morehead Planetarium and science Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More importantly, for our purposes on this program, he is also one of the co-founders of the North Carolina Science Festival, an annual event strongly supported for many years by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

00;00;40;05 – 00;01;00;02
Ernie Hood
Todd was appointed the fifth director of the Morehead Planetarium in 2006, and in 2010, he and his planetarium colleague Dennis Young, co-founded the North Carolina Science Festival, which in April 2017 celebrates its seventh edition. Todd Boyette, welcome to Focus In Sound.

00;01;00;17 – 00;01;01;25
Todd Boyette
Thank you for having me, Ernie.

00;01;02;12 – 00;01;10;04
Ernie Hood
Todd, To get us started, please give us a thumbnail sketch of what’s on tap for this year’s North Carolina Science Festival.

00;01;10;15 – 00;01;49;03
Todd Boyette
Oh, well, a lot is on tap for the 2017 iteration of the North Carolina Science Festival will have over 800 events from April 7th through April 23rd, starting actually the day before on April 6th. We have Captain James Lovell from the Apollo 13 mission, most famously, but also Apollo eight, One of the early astronauts, one of our most famous astronauts, true American hero, will be coming to Chapel Hill at Memorial Hall to talk about his experience as a as an astronaut, especially during the Apollo 13 mission.

00;01;49;26 – 00;02;18;22
Todd Boyette
We will have, in addition to that, events all over the state designed to reach all audiences, school audiences, preschool audiences. We like to say the North Carolina Science Festival is for people pre-K to gray. We will have over 800 events in all 100 counties in North Carolina. We are very proud of that achievement. And we were in 99 counties last year.

00;02;19;02 – 00;02;39;07
Todd Boyette
It’s important for us to provide these events and activities in accessible ways. And North Carolina is a big state and we want to celebrate the fact that science is everywhere. You don’t have to go to the Research Triangle Park to experience high quality science activities. Well, the.

00;02;39;07 – 00;02;43;00
Ernie Hood
Festival certainly gets bigger and better every year, doesn’t it?

00;02;43;12 – 00;03;07;17
Todd Boyette
I believe it does. We started in 2010. We had the idea in 2009, launched it in 2010. It was the first ever statewide effort to do a science festival. There have been a few regional science festivals in the country, but never one that aspired to reach the entire state. And the first year, as you would expect, we had a statewide vision.

00;03;07;18 – 00;03;30;17
Todd Boyette
We did not have statewide execution. Most of the activities were around the Triangle and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area. And then we started developing good relationships with event hosts from all over the state, and it’s taken us seven years, but now we are in every county. Our goal was to have at least one event within a 30 minute drive of every North Carolinian.

00;03;30;27 – 00;03;34;10
Todd Boyette
And I’m excited to say that we have achieved that goal this year.

00;03;34;11 – 00;03;39;01
Ernie Hood
And cumulatively, how many people have attended these events through the years?

00;03;39;06 – 00;03;44;19
Todd Boyette
Cumulatively from from day one, almost 2 million. We should reach the 2 million mark this year.

00;03;44;25 – 00;03;50;11
Ernie Hood
It’s certainly become an important touchstone for for everyone in the state and a source of great pride.

00;03;50;24 – 00;04;18;29
Todd Boyette
Absolutely. When we talked about doing the first ever North Carolina Science Festival, a lot of people resonated with this vision that we are celebrating the new economy. And if we were patting ourselves after anything, it was a 21st century version of a state fair. And the state fair celebrates agriculture in a wonderful way in the agricultural economy. That’s how it started in 1860.

00;04;18;29 – 00;04;36;28
Todd Boyette
For us. We wanted to celebrate the science based economy in North Carolina, and instead of having one central location where people would come to celebrate the science that’s in our state, we decided to completely decentralize it because there’s this good science happening all over the state.

00;04;37;10 – 00;04;47;22
Ernie Hood
Well, Todd, from the beginning, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund has been very involved with the festival. Can you give us a rundown of the history of that association?

00;04;48;19 – 00;05;10;18
Todd Boyette
I was on the board, advisory board of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. It’s for the North Carolina Science Math Technology Education Center. And Sam Houston and I are good friends and colleagues. And we were at a break in the meeting and I pulled him aside in front of the coffeemaker and I said, Sam, I have an idea for you.

00;05;11;06 – 00;05;40;04
Todd Boyette
When I ran the idea of the North Carolina Science Festival by him, and he was probably the second or third person outside of my leadership team that knew about this idea. And he got behind it immediately. He was able to connect me with John Burris, the president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. We worked it out over, I’d say within six weeks that the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, which would be a primary sponsor.

00;05;40;16 – 00;05;53;29
Todd Boyette
It was, I believe the support for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund came in just before the support from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So they were the very first dollars in to support the very first North Carolina Science Festival.

00;05;54;19 – 00;05;58;18
Ernie Hood
So they were actually the first platinum sponsor, as you put it.

00;05;59;04 – 00;06;20;22
Todd Boyette
That’s right. I’m not sure we had named it a platinum sponsor at that point. We had big ideas and big dreams and we needed someone to take a leap of faith with us and without the support of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, I’m not sure we could have launched it the way we did in 2010. So they were the very first sponsor.

00;06;21;00 – 00;06;34;01
Todd Boyette
And right on the heels of that, you can see Chapel Hill also supported us with funding. We needed some funding to hire some additional staff to help us realize this vision that we had.

00;06;34;07 – 00;06;42;03
Ernie Hood
Mm hmm. Then in March 2015, that association took a real leap forward. Tell us about that.

00;06;42;29 – 00;07;11;07
Todd Boyette
Burroughs Wellcome Fund has been integrally involved from day one, providing the first level of support, which became the leading level of support we modeled. Their first gift is that’s that’s a great gift. If we can get other sponsors of that level, that’ll help us tremendously. And then John Burris, the president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, joined our science festival board and has been a major contributor in terms of ideas and passion for the work.

00;07;11;07 – 00;07;38;05
Todd Boyette
He’s been a been a supporter from the very beginning, providing us great counsel. And then in 2014, summer of 2014, John told me that he was interested in pursuing this idea of endowing the science festival. And in 2015 we were awarded a $1 million gift from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to create an endowment for the North Carolina Science Festival.

00;07;38;15 – 00;08;00;25
Todd Boyette
I’m proud to say that is the first endowment gift any science festival in the country has received. We are working a network there over 50 science festivals in the country and we all talk and we all work together with best practices. And I will say the rest of the nation is quite envious of the North Carolina Science Festival.

00;08;00;29 – 00;08;07;09
Ernie Hood
I’ll bet. Well, Todd, what will the endowment gift mean to the festival long term?

00;08;07;16 – 00;08;47;19
Todd Boyette
It means the science festival is here to stay. We will continue to secure support every year for the science festival. We run on about a $600,000 budget. Considering we reach about 450,000 people, that’s a pretty good return on the investment. But one thing we don’t have to worry about now is raising the money to pay for the the staff that supports the science festival, the key staff, the science festival director, mainly this this position is funded now primarily through the proceeds of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund gift.

00;08;48;01 – 00;09;12;20
Todd Boyette
What we can do then is use that and leverage other support leverage additional relationships throughout the state. We work with over 300 partners across the state to make the science festival happen. Jonathan Frederick, the Science Festival director, is busy spending time building those relationships. He doesn’t need to worry about whether his salary is in the bank or not, and so the endowment allows us to take care of that.

00;09;12;25 – 00;09;17;06
Ernie Hood
All right. So so it’s it’s really provided some stability and longevity.

00;09;17;25 – 00;09;36;18
Todd Boyette
That’s right. That’s that’s what endowments are supposed to do. They’re supposed to provide you continuity, sustainable support. And so in perpetuity, we’ll have the support to provide the citizens of North Carolina a high quality science celebration every spring.

00;09;37;21 – 00;09;59;28
Ernie Hood
TODD The festival’s mission statement includes this statement. This festival provides the opportunity to cultivate a positive environment that encourages children to pursue science related careers and encourages businesses to invest in North Carolina. How successful do you think the festival has been in fulfilling those objectives?

00;10;00;09 – 00;10;36;05
Todd Boyette
That’s a very good question. We take the long view. I don’t think we overestimate the impact. We do realize that what we’re doing is shining a light on stem science, technology, engineering and math every April, and it’s a 17 day period of time. We have no expectations that we are transfer warming the world in those 17 days. What we do understand and what we’ve seen is that during that 17 day period, we do create a lot of excitement around science in North Carolina.

00;10;36;17 – 00;11;04;08
Todd Boyette
And what we’re we’re finding out now we’re doing some research on this. I hired a team of evaluators to look at this in the process of executing the North Carolina Science Festival. We rely heavily on other partners. When we started the festival in 2010, when it was launched. Many of those partners were doing great work but did not know about the work of the others.

00;11;04;25 – 00;11;33;06
Todd Boyette
And so what we’re finding is this network of science education providers, traditional and nontraditional. I mean, we’re doing events all over the place in libraries, certainly in science museums and schools and and universities and community colleges, but also in places like libraries and restaurants and wineries and breweries and natural parks. And so these organizations are now we all know each other and we’re working together.

00;11;33;10 – 00;11;46;09
Todd Boyette
And that’s where the real impact is, is certainly in support of what’s happening in 17 days. But then what happens in the other 348 days? And that’s where you make that’s where you move the needle in North Carolina.

00;11;47;17 – 00;11;55;01
Ernie Hood
So, Todd, people who are interested in the science festival, hopefully from having heard this podcast, what should they do to access more information?

00;11;55;14 – 00;12;21;24
Todd Boyette
The best way to find out about the science festival is to check on our website. We update that regularly. There’s an interactive map. It lists all of the events that you can plug into. That is NC Science Festival DOT org or you can Google NC Science Festival and it’ll go right to our website. It’s a very, very user friendly way to find out about what kinds of events are in your area when they are.

00;12;22;05 – 00;12;32;06
Todd Boyette
I promise you, no matter where you live in North Carolina, you will be able to find a cool event that you and your family will enjoy. And so please check us out.

00;12;32;24 – 00;12;45;08
Ernie Hood
Well, Todd, the festival is certainly a crown jewel for North Carolina. And I know it’s a source of great pride to the Burroughs Wellcome Fund as well. Keep up the great work and thank you so much for joining us here on Focus In Sound.

00;12;45;20 – 00;12;46;11
Todd Boyette
Thank you, Ernie.

00;12;47;26 – 00;13;03;05
Ernie Hood
We hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of the Focus In Sound podcast. Until next time. This is Ernie Hood. Thanks for listening.