“Mechanotransduction” is a term I would use to describe my research topic, and it works perfectly well, as long as the goal is to earn confused looks and immediately suffocate the conversation about what I study in the laboratory. Technical language is a common barrier of communication between scientists and nonscientists, but I believe that making complex research findings understandable to members of the public falls firmly within our duty as scientists. I have thus looked to improve my response to this question over the years, and when asked now I reply like this:

“Hold your right index finger up and push it against the palm of your left hand. Can you feel that you’re touching your hand? We do it all the time and it seems simple, but actually, your body just performed an astounding feat. When you applied pressure, a physical or mechanical force, nerve cells in your hand registered this. In response to this force, ion channels in your nerve cells opened to allow charged particles to enter, thus transforming the physical stimulus of external pressure into a biochemical signal. What’s more, the charge in your nerve cell changed because of the ions entering, and that created an electrical signal, which was passed along to your brain, allowing you to register that your finger pressed against your palm: that was mechanotransduction! A physical stimulus, transformed into a biochemical response that resulted in an electrical signal. On a molecular level, this deceivingly simple process is utterly fascinating to me. My research attempts to decipher how this process happens, only not in nerve cells but in red blood cells.”