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What career path would you pick if you hated math but loved science and were good at writing? That was the question facing a young Sharon Parmet as she was finishing up college at Skidmore College in the late 1990s. Growing up on Long Island, Parmet had fallen in love with biology while still in elementary school. But equations and data analysis weren’t her thing, and she didn’t like the idea of spending her life in a laboratory surrounded by flasks and pipettes. Her timing was good: “Some graduate programs in science journalism started popping up, and they seemed like the perfect combination for me.”
Parmet enrolled in Boston University’s science journalism program. After finishing her master’s degree, Parmet discovered her fluency in science and ability to explain complex topics in understandable terms was in high demand. She moved to Chicago for a job in the public affairs office for the University of Chicago Hospitals and Biological Sciences Division where she spent her days talking to world-class scientists about their published research. Her desire for new challenges took her to the Chicago-based American Medical Association, where she promoted the research in the AMA’s many medical specialty journals, and then to the American Hearing Foundation, which was looking for an executive director. The organization was so small that Parmet became its only employee, which meant she did everything from writing a newsletter to running board meetings and fundraising.
While at the American Hearing Research Foundation, Parmet heard that some of her former colleagues at the University of Chicago had moved on to the communications department at the University of Illinois Chicago. She decided she was ready for a new challenge and took a job in the UIC news bureau covering the hospital and the health sciences colleges. Parmet and her husband were making a literal move as well: They had purchased a Chicago bungalow on the city’s Northwest Side. Parmet became an avid gardener, filling her small backyard with native plants that would attract birds, another interest of hers. She became so serious about gardening that she entered a garden design program at the College of DuPage in the western suburbs and ended up helping to manage its 16-acre prairie as a student worker.
Her next career move brought together her love of gardening and science journalism. Parmet took a position at Urban Autism Solutions, a small nonprofit working with public school students on Chicago’s West Side. The group had a 1.2-acre farm called Growing Solutions Farm in the Illinois Medical District where students could gain transferrable job skills as they cultivated and sold produce at an on-site farm stand. In addition to her communications duties, Parmet created a sensory garden at the farm, which allowed her to put her gardening knowledge to use. Parmet also wanted to generate more awareness of the group’s activities, so she started doing media training with some of the students with autism. “The students had communication issues and they had never been interviewed before,” she says. “I had to hang out with them for a couple of weeks to really gain their trust before I could introduce the idea of being interviewed for TV or the paper.” Eventually Parmet found a good candidate for interviews and he became her go-to person. Alejandro was featured in stories about employment and the farm by the Chicago Tribune, ABC 7 News, WTTW Chicago Tonight and Fox 32.
In 2021, Parmet saw a posting for a knowledge translation position at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. “It was a lot like science communications, and I knew I could do that,” she says.
Parmet joined Shirley Ryan AbilityLab as a healthcare communications associate for the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) in early 2023 and quickly made an impact. She created a podcast called INside the OUTcomes for CROR, while also managing all CROR social media. On top of that, she writes HCBS Quality Matters, a quarterly newsletter for a $4.4 million grant to develop and test quality-of-life measures for people receiving home- and community-based services.
In her free time, Parmet is still consumed with horticulture and birding, and she travels the world looking for birds she hasn’t encountered before. "When I see a bird, especially a species I haven't seen before, I feel more connected to the wider world we live in,” she says. “That can be a pretty rare feeling, but birding provides me a direct line to that sensation.”