Writing

Writing is at the heart of science communication, whether the end product is an article, a podcast episode, or a video script. Here is a sampling of some of my recent work.

I’ve written for TrowelBlazers, a platform devoted to showcasing female role models in archaeology, palaeontology, and geology. Marie Tharp was instrumental in making the first maps of the ocean floor, revealing massive mid-ocean ridges and ultimately leading to the acceptance of plate tectonics. Inge Lehmann, a Danish seismologist, discovered the Earth’s inner core by analyzing some problematic earthquake data (I also wrote a companion blogpost on seismic waves and Earth’s core here).

Although I’m on hiatus for now, my blog True Anomalies is where I reflect on episodes from the history of science, exciting planetary science news, or events and issues in the world of science communication.

Here’s a profile of Computer Science undergraduate Ruyan Chen that I wrote for the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, which appeared in their fall 2015 magazine.

As a graduate student, I also occasionally wrote for various campus publications, including Engineering & Science, Meander, and The California Tech.

I’m a host for the PhysicsCentral podcast, part of an outreach effort by the American Physical Society. A lot of time goes into crafting these episodes, and the biggest part comes down to editing the interviews and writing the script. Topics I’ve covered include how to listen for black holes, why it’s so hard to get to Mercury, and what rock magnetism can tell us about our planet’s dynamic past.

I am an experienced script writer and animator, and my work has appeared on many premiere YouTube science channels, including Veritasium, MinuteEarth, PHD Comics, and Socratica.

I collaborated with Veritasium to create a video about a huge pet peeve of mine: Earth’s mantle is solid, folks, even though it convects!

Here’s a brief video I wrote and narrated for PHD Comics on Georges Cuvier and the history of mass extinctions:

I’ve written several episodes for Socratica‘s astronomy series on YouTube:

I wrote a script for a MinuteEarth video about sand that has been viewed almost 2.5 million times!