About

When we talk about our research, we frequently use the word “story” to describe the collection of experiments that all address a particular hypothesis.

​Scientific communication has historically focused on translating scientific concepts into “layman’s terms,” but what if instead of translating, academia incorporated storytelling principles into how they present their research to their peers and the general public?

Bridging the gap between scientific discovery and understanding, this event will feature storytellers from different disciplines, giving them a platform to inspire academics from all levels of their career to find the narratives in their research to make their work accessible and easy-to-understand for the general public.

Origin is open to the entire UCR community. 

Date: December 4, 2020

Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM PST

Location: Virtual

Speakers

Stephanie Fine Sasse

Stephanie Fine Sasse is a trained neuroscientist, multi-disciplinary designer, and educator whose work unites social impact, science, play, and the arts. Her keystone projects include "It's Only Human", a multi-sensory art and science exhibition on human bias, and "I Am A Scientist", a storytelling and experiential learning campaign that promotes diverse representation in STEM fields for >200,000 students nationwide. As a scientist and scholar at Harvard University, she co-published on human behavior in leading academic journals and created award-winning courses on media literacy and science communication.

In 2017, she became a lead organizer of the March for Science (MFS) in San Francisco and Washington, DC; a movement that mobilized over one million supporters worldwide. She co-authored “Science Not Silence”, an internationally-recognized collection of science advocacy stories released by MIT Press in Spring 2018. In addition, she created MFS's SIGNS (Science in Government, Institutions & Society) Summit, which trained global grassroots leaders advocating for equitable, evidence-based policy.

Stephanie founded The Plenary, Co., a 501(c)3 nonprofit, to responsibly engage the public with social, scientific, and environmental issues. She saw the urgent need for collaborative, inspiring, and exploratory opportunities that cut through misinformation and make critical issues more accessible. The organization produces creative educational experiences informed by the science of how people truly learn.

The Plenary, Co. is a first-of-its-kind organization that completely redefines what "education" looks like throughout our lives, democratizes the arts and sciences in service of common good, and produces novel learning opportunities to bridge people, knowledge, & the planet.

​Mindy Nicewonger

Mindy Nicewonger is a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, CO. Her current research focuses on how climate change impacts the emissions of stratospheric ozone-depleting gases.  She earned her PhD in Earth System Science from the University of California, Irvine in 2019. There, her dissertation research aimed to answer the question of how wildfires changed in the past and what this could mean for our future earth. To answer this question, she used polar ice cores, samples of ice from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which contain tiny bubbles of the ancient atmosphere trapped inside the ice. With those snapshots of what was in the atmosphere for thousands of years, she was able to look for gases which are specifically emitted from fires. For this TEDx talk, Mindy will share her story of being a young, first generation, female scientist accomplishing her high school dream of conducting research in the coldest, driest, and windiest place on earth, Antarctica, and the scientific discovery that followed.

Headshot by: Steve Zylius/UCI

Maggie Lieu

Dr Maggie Lieu is a research fellow of Machine Learning and Cosmology at the University of Nottingham where she teaches the Master's course Machine Learning in Science II. Over the past few years, she has been working on developing state of the art algorithms to help Astronomers and Astrophysicists like herself prepare for upcoming big data surveys.

Caroline Hung

Originally an immigrant from Taiwan, Caroline Hung found her passion for the outdoors early on in the rainy, lush Pacific Northwest. She attended Williams College in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in Geosciences and Biology in 2019. After braving the cold winters of New England, Caroline made the trek back to the west coast, this time to her pleasant surprise, in Southern California where it is always sunny. She is currently a 2nd year PhD student in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at the University of California-Riverside. Her training as a member of the Lyons Biogeochemistry Lab specializes in trace elements redox chemistry and novel metal isotope systematics in both modern and ancient settings with applications for understanding the co-evolution of life and early environments as it relates to the interdisciplinary field of Astrobiology. Outside of her main field and lab research focusing on the evolving biogeochemistry of the nearby Salton Sea, she is interested in STEM education and actively advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academic disciplines. As an avid reader, she has always been fascinated by the power of narrative prose. She dreams of one day sharing this wonder and passion for words through her own storytelling. Outside of work, Caroline is a dancer in the styles of hip hop, jazz, and contemporary, and a frequent catcher of sunsets— from the coasts to the mountains.

For this TEDx talk, Caroline will talk about how her career aspirations for Earth Sciences were first inspired by field work —   focusing specifically on the narratives of a (particularly treacherous) field day that changed her life's perspective. Caroline will talk about challenges she has faced so far in the discipline, and how the important mentors and peers she has met along the way helped build her self-efficacy and reminded her of why she started on this journey in the first place.