Friday, January 29th at 7 pm ET, join us for our online live show! Three storytellers from the Boston area will share true, personal stories about science, and we'll invite our audience to share their ten-word stories as well!
This event is free, or you may pay up to $50 on a sliding scale if you wish to donate to The Story Collider. Reserve your spot and watch here or on the page below!
Produced by Ari Daniel, Katherine J. Wu, and Reyhaneh Maktoufi
Stories by:
Desirée Plata’s research seeks to maximize technology’s benefit to society while minimizing environmental impacts through the use of geochemical tools. Plata earned her doctoral degree in Chemical Oceanography and Environmental Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (2009) and her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Union College in Schenectady, NY (2003). Plata is an NSF CAREER Awardee (2016), Odebrecht-Braskem Sustainable Innovation Awardee (2015), National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering Fellow (2012, 2020), National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow (2011, 2013), Caltech Resnick Sustainability Fellow (2017), and winner of MIT’s Junior Bose Teaching Award (2019). Plata is Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT.
Babak Tafreshi is the creator of The World At Night international program. In the past two decades he has photographed breathtaking scenes of the night sky in all continents, an effort to reveal the wonders of science to public, to preserve the natural night environment, and connect cultures through common interest to the night sky. He is a National Geographic photographer and a science communicator, merging art and science, a contributing photographer to Sky&Telescope magazine and the European Southern Observatory. Born in 1978 in Tehran, Babak lives in Boston. He received 2009 Lennart Nilsson Award, the world’s most recognized at the time for scientific imaging. babaktafreshi.com
Zuri Sullivan is an immunologist and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where she studies how the immune system influences animal behavior. She hails from the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia) and is fascinated by how the immune system helps animals adapt to different environments. Outside the lab, Zuri is passionate about increasing access to STEM careers for folks of all genders and ethnic backgrounds and sharing her science with the public. She loves spin class, sparkling rosé, and bragging about the fact that she shares a birthday with Beyoncé.