The Story Collider is partnering with Springer Nature for this show in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. Join us for five stories about the Earth and space sciences! Full lineup to be announced soon. Register below to attend this free event.
Stories by:
Brendan Bane is a freelance science communicator and recent graduate of the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. His interest in biology blossomed when he first laid his eyes upon a giant, hairy tarantula. He later followed his passion to the cloud forests of Costa Rica, where he studied how tarantulas communicate their romantic intentions. (Basically, they twerk). Though he loved tromping through forests and spying on spiders in their roadside burrows, his greatest thrill did not come from the field or laboratory. Instead, he was happiest onstage, bringing audiences face to fang with spiders through visual storytelling. Now, through science reporting, he immerses readers in the lives of all flora and fauna, whether wondrous or weird.
Mike Brudzinski earned a Ph.D. in Geophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed an endowed postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining Miami University of Ohio in 2004. His scientific research is focused on the origins of hazardous earthquakes. He is also helping to uncover relationships between enhanced oil and gas recovery and a remarkable increase in earthquakes in the central and eastern US. His work has been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine, National Review, and in an appearance on the Glenn Beck TV Show. His educational focus is on developing active e-learning courses through assessment of inquiry-based learning, student engagement, and authentic scientific experiences in computer-enabled classrooms.
Susan Hough graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in geophysics in 1982 and received a PhD in Earth sciences from UC San Diego in 1988. Since 1992 she has worked as a research geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Pasadena, studying earthquake ground motions, induced earthquakes, and seismic hazard. She led deployments of portable seismometers following a number of damaging earthquakes including the 1989 Loma Prieta, California, 2010 Haiti, and 2015 Nepal events. She has co-authored over 120 articles, and was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2009. In addition to technical articles, she has long-standing interests in science communication, having authored five books on earthquake science for a non-specialist audience as well as numerous popular articles.
M. Beatrice Magnani is a seismologist whose overarching research theme is the formation, evolution of continents and continental dynamics. Dr. Magnani received her Ph.D. in 2000 in Earth Sciences at the University of Perugia, in Italy, where she worked on the tectonics of the Northern Apennines mountain belt. Shortly after completing her Ph.D., she moved to the U.S. and was a post-doc at Rice University for 5 years. She joined the faculty of the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI) at the University of Memphis in 2006, where she established the Exploration Seismology Program and became involved with the study of intraplate regions. In 2013 she moved to SMU where she is an Associate Professor at the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.
Dawn Wright is chief scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (aka Esri), a world-leading geographic information system (GIS) software, research and development company, as well as a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University. Among her research specialties are seafloor mapping and tectonics, ocean exploration and conservation, environmental informatics, and ethics in information technology. Dawn is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America and of Stanford University's Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, as well as an American Geophysical Union Leptoukh Awardee and board member of COMPASS Science Communication, Inc. She is also currently into road cycling, apricot green tea gummy bears, 18th-century pirates, her dog Sally, and SpongeBob Squarepants. Follow her on Twitter @deepseadawn