Join us in Boston on October 23 for five true, personal stories about unexpected plot twists!
Hosted by Ari Daniel and Katherine Wu.
Doors at 7:30 p.m. Stories begin at 8 p.m.
Stories by:
Kory Evans is an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the development, evolution and ecology of phenotypic diversity. His research integrates developmental biology, biomechanics, phylogenetic comparative methods, and ecology to understand how phenotypes develop, evolve, and interact with their respective environments across multiple time scales and how intrinsic (development) and extrinsic (environment) mechanisms influence patterns of phenotypic diversity.
Stephanie Keep was trained as a paleobiologist at Wellesley College and Harvard University. Opting to leave research behind, she now resides comfortably in the center of a Venn diagram that includes science education, academia, and communication. She has edited college- and high school-level textbooks, worked for the state on science assessments, and continues to do freelance work for nonprofit groups that produce free high-quality stuff for teachers. Stephanie is co-founder of a BiteScis, a spin-off organization of ComSciCon that brings together educators and researchers to develop misconception-focused lesson plans rooted in current research. She loves farm animals, hates olives, can’t spell the word “resources,” and will do pretty much anything to get references to whales, cephalopods, and xenarthrans into the stuff she writes.
Laura Kiesel is a writer and advocate on health, social justice and environmental causes. Her articles and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vice, The Washington Post, Politico, Salon, Harvard Health Publications and many other outlets, while her first book of poetry is forthcoming with Unsolicited Press. She teaches creative nonfiction and poetry at Grub Street in Boston. Originally from Brooklyn, New York she now enjoys Beantown and its outer suburbs and lands, where she spends most of her free time getting lost in the woods, looking at art, and hanging out with the goats of various local farms. Laura is also the servant of two adorable but demanding cats. She has a habit of staying up way too late at night, usually reading.
Arlo Pérez Esquivel was raised in Mexico until the age of 16, when he left for the United States. There, he moved across multiple states, and lived in the homes of different friends and relatives in order to finish his education. During this constant movement, Arlo developed a passion for street photography. His work attempts to investigate the “sense of place” by capturing people, their environment, and the relationship between the two. He is now a Digital Associate Producer for NOVA on PBS, currently working on a ten-part digital series on how life and science are done in Antarctica.
George Stephans is a nuclear physicist with more than 30 years of experience doing both research and teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently works on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland. Early in his teaching career, he worked on physics classes specifically designed for MIT students who came from non-traditional backgrounds and therefore did not have as much preparation in math or the sciences as their peers. More recently, he has focused on using online resources both to enhance physics classes for MIT students and to provide access to MIT-level physics instruction to a world-wide community of learners. When not doing physics, he spends as much time as possible running or hiking.