A scientific experiment can disappoint its author and still produce a picture worth framing. Caitlin Vander Weele saw an audience in that awkward little gap. While working toward her doctorate at MIT, she began sharing images that might otherwise have disappeared into laboratory storage. The experiment had its own verdict. The picture, apparently, was entitled to appeal.
That observation became Interstellate, a collaborative magazine of neuroscience images. Later came Stellate Communications, the company she founded in 2020. A free art publication and a communications business may appear to belong on different shelves. In Vander Weele’s career, they address a related question: what happens to scientific work after the people who made it have finished looking?
Her story is easiest to follow through the things she made. There are laboratory images, two self-published volumes, a company, and a growing body of writing about how ideas travel. Each involves deciding what another person needs in order to care. The reader, like the neuron, has connections of their own.
A microscope, then a magazine
Vander Weele came originally from Frankenmuth, Michigan. She studied at the University of Michigan before going to MIT, where she worked in Kay Tye’s laboratory. Her scientific interests included communication between brain regions. The tools available at MIT offered ways to examine those connections with a precision that had excited her as an undergraduate.
She also wanted to explain her work to friends and family. A visual thesis offered one route. Images could invite people into a subject before they had learned its vocabulary. As she shared pictures on social media, the response came from scientists and people outside research alike. That was a useful discovery about an audience, made alongside her discoveries at the bench.
The magazine gave the images somewhere to live together. An early collection drew contributions from 69 scientists in nine countries. Its subjects ranged from individual neurons to larger arrangements of cells. The variety mattered: the work offered several ways to look, rather than a single picture appointed to represent an entire discipline.
In her account of starting the project, Vander Weele placed its beginning in May 2016 and admitted that procrastination had played a part. She sent more than 100 cold emails asking colleagues and investigators for images. By October, a digital first volume was online. Sponsors helped make more than 1,000 printed copies available for free. Procrastination seldom comes with such a distribution plan.
Free copies, serious questions
Interstellate’s opening pages asked questions a scientist’s friends and family might reasonably ask: what is the brain made of, how is it studied, and why should public money support the work? Vander Weele gave education and celebration space in the same project. An image from an inconclusive experiment could sit within a larger account of what research involves.
Her introduction described the pleasure of looking into a microscope at the end of an experiment. The publication carried that close attention outward. Its pages paired images with explanations, allowing a reader to admire the picture and then learn something about its making. Beauty supplied the invitation; the accompanying words made the visit worthwhile.
Two volumes eventually appeared, with physical copies distributed at Society for Neuroscience meetings in 2016 and 2017. The project depended on people donating images, editorial work, money, and booth space. In a later recollection, Vander Weele credited Benjamin Saunders with observing that her images resembled neurons from space. The name Interstellate followed. A scientific collaboration had acquired a small celestial joke.
She has since said the project is no longer active. The volumes remain available online. That finite life gives the story a pleasing specificity: she made actual publications, found contributors, arranged printing, and put copies into readers’ hands. A side project can teach its creator quite a lot before anyone thinks to call it professional development.
“Neuroscience outreach and education through art”Interstellate, Volume 1
The business hiding in the side project
Her career also included freelance communications and agency work. Corporate communications showed her what sustained support could look like: people paid to think about messages, executives, public presentation, and relationships with the press. She began considering how researchers might benefit from a comparable arrangement.
In her founder’s account, she describes academic training as an education in the business of science. Publishing, seeking funding, and establishing a reputation had already required her to understand institutions and incentives. Those experiences were useful material for building a firm that would work with researchers. The laboratory had provided more than familiarity with technical language.
Stellate’s remit grew to include communications and research operations. Its founder reports more than $52.5 million in awarded client grant funding. That is an agency outcome, belonging to work done with clients and colleagues. It also helps explain why the company’s services extend beyond the moment when a journalist picks up the telephone.
By March 2026, Vander Weele said the first client was still working with the company six years after the relationship began. She also described doing the business paperwork herself for the first two or three years before bringing in professional help. The founder who wanted to build things had acquired some less photogenic things to build: accounting arrangements, legal support, and the everyday machinery of a company.
An audience is a choice
Today, Stellate describes a team of more than 20 communicators and creatives. Vander Weele leads it as founder and CEO. Her colleagues include fellow MIT-trained scientist and co-founder Gabi Serrato Marks, alongside designers, writers, and media specialists. The business puts several kinds of expertise around the same scientific work.
The combination makes sense in light of Vander Weele’s own path. Understanding the research is one task. Finding its shape on a page, deciding who should encounter it, and keeping that encounter accurate are related tasks that require time and judgment. A PhD may help with the first. It does not automatically supply a spare afternoon for the others.
Her January 2026 essay on framing spells out a five-part approach: audience, context, message, correction, and dissemination. She argues for choosing a primary audience and considering the beliefs and existing narratives through which that audience will interpret information. The order is revealing. The reader arrives in the plan before the sentence does.
This approach treats communication as a continuing responsibility. Reliable explanations need to be visible and reinforced over time. The satisfying moment of pressing publish is therefore only one moment in the job. A useful account has to remain findable after the announcement, when someone finally becomes curious enough to look.
- Audience
- Context
- Message
- Correction
- Dissemination
Leave room for the reporter
In April 2026, Vander Weele turned to the practicalities of media relations. Her advice included giving reporters substantial advance notice, considering when a preprint becomes newsworthy, and understanding that different fields publish through different systems. A communications calendar needs to fit the work it is trying to explain.
She also defended specialist publications, newsletters, and podcasts. Their audiences may be precisely the people interested in a particular piece of research. The familiar pursuit of a famous outlet can obscure a more useful question: who would actually want to read this? Prestige is a convenient shorthand. It is a less reliable address label.
That argument has a quiet connection to Interstellate. Both give attention to material that may sit outside the most obvious route to recognition. The magazine made room for images that would not appear in a paper. Her media advice makes room for audiences and outlets that deserve consideration on their own terms.
The salsa test
By June 2026, she was examining what had happened to science’s online conversations. Twitter had helped researchers find colleagues, papers, reporters, and informal advice. Its dispersal across other networks presented a communications problem with a social texture: a list of platforms cannot quite describe the experience of belonging to a community.
Vander Weele identified LinkedIn as a priority for professional science communication, while recognizing the roles of Bluesky and more private spaces. She also noted what polished professional posting tends to miss. Her example was wonderfully ordinary: the sort of question about how long an open container of salsa could remain in the refrigerator.
The example earns its place. People form connections while discussing methods and papers, but also while being people with kitchens. Her writing leaves room for those incidental encounters. Someone who began a publication by emailing colleagues for pictures understands the value of a network whose members are willing to answer.
A voice worth hiring
Another 2026 essay brought the argument closer to her desk. A hiring round had produced more than 350 applications for two Stellate openings. Reading short answers together, Vander Weele found too much similar language and too little evidence of an individual writer. For a communications role, she wanted to hear a person.
She acknowledged using AI in her own writing process. Her concern was what applicants allowed it to replace. She valued clear examples, specific outcomes, a visible process, and the ability to follow directions. One applicant’s claim to be able to converse with a brick wall caught her attention. Even an immovable audience, it seems, deserves a communications strategy.
The preference fits the work that first made her visible outside the laboratory. Interstellate succeeded in giving particular images room to be seen. Stellate asks for similarly particular attention to the people making discoveries and the people encountering them. Vander Weele’s career has kept returning to that act of looking again. There was something worth sharing in the drawer. She found a way to open it.