Exhibition Development: COVID + Community

For the past year and some change, it was my honor to work with the BMGF Discovery Center and South Seattle Emerald to develop an exhibition about the COVID-19 pandemic during the COVID-19 pandemic. If that sounds surreal and incredibly challenging––emotionally, professionally, scientifically, the whole bit––it was! But if it weren’t hard, how would we know it was a COVID exhibition?

Even as the pandemic marches on, I feel proud of where this project landed, and if you’re in Seattle, you should check it out. Huge thanks to the BMGF Discovery Center team for trusting me with this work, for the beautiful oral history project that started it all, and for their expertise, empathy, and willingness to embrace the many moving parts of this deeply complex undertaking. Community is the key to survival, after all. More photos and reflections here.

Updates: Real Science

As of March, I’m officially a Research and Evaluation Associate at the Science Museum of Minnesota. What does that mean? I’m continuing to use science to study how people learn about science (the research part of my job), and to see if the science museum is effectively teaching people science (the evaluation part of my job), only now I design & head studies myself. It’s an honor and a thrill.

In fact, I talked about it on twitter via the @RealScientists handle last month as well. More on that and my journey into science here. [Check back for the Storify soon…]

In other news….

Last week I attended the American Alliance of Museums annual conference and presented a poster about the reflective interview techniques used in my research this past year (spoiler: kids know more about themselves than you think; puppets help).

Conference highlight:  After his awesome talk on animal empathy, famed primatologist Frans de Waal and I nerded out together about animal intelligence, anthropomorphism, and the problems with psychology and neuroscience. He rubbed his chin and got thinky about my dolphin book, which is the highest compliment you can receive from a researcher. You know his work on “fairness” in monkeys. Or you should:
May 20th, I’ll be in Washington DC as a scholarship recipient at the National Institutes of Health Science Education conference (NIHSciEd2015). May 28th, I’ll be at our very own Walker Arts Center for the first annual arts journalism conference, SUPERSCRIPT, because I keep insisting art and science belong together. (My SciArt column should ramp up again by then.) By the end of the year, I’ll have attended seven science and arts conferences. No rest for the wearious (weary+curious).

See you at a brown bag soon?

Transplantation

Here’s some stuff I was coyly withholding and/or forgot:

The Tangential has a book out and I have a piece in there! They let me write about Minnesota even though I’m not originally from here. In it, I explain the science behind that thing that happens when it’s so cold that you step outside and start swearing like a sailor. “Minnesota Tourette’s” I call it. See if you can find the super weird typo in the title that no one seemed to notice. Fun with print media.

Tomorrow, I’m honored to be part of the acclaimed international reading series Women of Letters alongside some pretty hardcore badasses. We’ll lay ourselves bare at Joe’s Pub in NYC. Come crush with us.

Meanwhile, things at the Science Museum are chugging along nicely. I’m learning about how kids connect to engineering and how grownups connect to nano (and probably learn better from it). Shhh. More when we publish.

And what ever happened to my Sci+Art column at the Walker Art Center’s MNartists.org? It’ll be back in two weeks. I just had to do some science and write about dolphins in secret for a bit.

Science Writing for Slate

For my first piece on Slate’s sci/tech blog, Future Tense, I asked scientists what they’d like to see change in science this year. Here’s what they told me.

Got your own Scientific Resolutions? Lay ’em on me!

Smells like paper.

So this is a website. Of my very own. It’s cold in here. Someone open a window.