Register Log in

Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

World Science Fest: science gets you cool jobs

In a program targeted at younger audiences, five people with jobs that are …

As we mentioned in our earlier coverage, a number of the programs at the World Science Festival were targeted at younger audiences. Yesterday's program was no exception, as people doing interesting science-related jobs gave a approachable descriptions of how science got them work that pretty much everyone would recognize as cool.

Monkey Magician: Laurie Santos of Yale described how she got drawn in by trying to understand the origin of the human mind, but wound up limited by the fact that all the best species to test this—our ancestors—are extinct. Instead, she works with lemurs, capuchins, and macaques. To figure out how they think, she does magic tricks. By performing illusions, she and her students can tell when a monkey gets confused by illusions that challenge things like counting ability. Santos had a great ability to put the issues in a way that pretty much anyone could get the experiments, and used videos of the unpredictable behaviors of her subjects to great effect.

Real-life CSI: Peter Diaczuk teaches forensics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and he gets to play with lots of things that go boom. He wowed the crowd with a massive gun library, and showed images of explosives before and after detonation. He explained how both the physics and chemistry of these things and the objects they send flying around can reconstruct scenes that are otherwise in the inaccessible past.

Life on Mars: Astrobiologist Chris McKay kicked off his talk with a computer animation of the Phoenix lander's trip to the surface of Mars, which got a big ovation. McKay claimed his job hit a trinity of coolness: people, planets, and places. He and his co-workers mimic the conditions of planets like Mars by going to literally chilly locations like the dry valleys of Antarctica in order to try to figure out how life on earth might inform our search for it elsewhere. He even claimed enthusiasm about the part of that work that sent him into a hole in the five meters of ice that cover Antarctic lakes in order to examine the thriving microbial communities at their bottoms.

Life in the Oceans: NASA's federal brethren, NOAA, cares about inner space, and Ellen Prager runs their inner-space station, the Aquarius research platform, nestled 65 feet underwater off the Florida Keys. Prager described how starting off undersea and adjusted to the pressures there helps scientists get more time studying things like coral restoration, ocean acidification, and other issues relevant to conservation of the seas.

Making Waves: The session brought some engineering into play, too, as Ben Schwegler, the chief scientist of Disney, talked about constructing things like wave pools and rollercoasters based on basic physics and studying how waves happen in the ocean. For Disney, it's not simply enough to get waves; the waves have to break in a specific location, not carry enough force to injure anyone, and dissipate before reaching the shallow end of the pool. Since what Schwegler builds can cost millions of dollars, he has to get it right in the design stage, and science gives him the confidence that he will.

I wasn't the presentation's target audience, and I still wound up wanting about half these jobs (although, I have to say that being a science writer is pretty cool). The kids in the audience, who probably have a bit more career flexibility than I do, seem to have absolutely loved it. As with all the programs I've attended, the presenters were really enthused about connecting with the audience, and stayed long after the end of the session, talking with audience members that mobbed the edge of the stage.

I'm going to suggest two topics for discussion here: what cool jobs have you done that relied on scientific knowledge? And can we get this model of public engagement to work for audiences outside of a single auditorium in New York?

Expand full story

This article does not have a comment thread.

Need to register for a new account?

If you don't have an account yet it's free and easy.