Science Superpowers: Not What You Think

good afternoon everyone um so my name is Taylor Stewart and I'm the president of the biology Society here at Salem State um and it's with great pleasure that I introduce our speaker Kar Romano young an esteemed science writer illustrator and deepsea diver with the passion for both science and art Karen's carved a unique Niche for herself in the world of science communication her journey into this realm focuses on the intersection of Science and storytelling armed with her biology background and

artistic talents she embarked on a mission to make science accessible and engaging to to audiences of all ages throughout her illustrious career Karen has captivated readers with insightful writing and enlightening illustrations from children's books exploring the wonders of the natural world to articles delving and Cutting Edge scientific research her work spans a wide range of topics and audiences her ability to distill complex scientific Concepts into engaging narratives has earned her widesp

read Acclaim and recognition As We Gather here today to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Darwin Festival it's fitting that we welcome her to present science superpowers not what you think um please joining me in extending a warm welcome to Karen Romano young a true Pioneer in the field of science communication thank you Taylor hi everyone I'm happy to be here I'm going to share my screen and go on chatting at you and while I do that if you would grab something to write with and a few pieces

of paper we're going to be doing some drawing during this session and I want you to be ready to join okay so this is me um a couple of drawings of myself and where to find me and this is me and somebody who ought to be familiar to you if you go to the galpagos islands you will see an awful lot of images of this guy he has had a big influence um on the galpagos islands and on the Sciences as a researcher and as a writer there are not that many people who do both but Charles Darwin is definitely

one of them and had a big impact this book that you see on the right Galapagos Islands is my newest book it will not actually be out till June though you can pre-order it Galapagos Islands the world's living laboratory not only in terms of darwinian science but in terms of today and how we're handling um living as people so there's a lot more about Galapagos that are humans as well as all of the animals and plants that Darwin shown a light on shined a light on I'm not too sure as a writer let's

go forward so I'm a children's author and illustrator I have a degree in education and I started my career at Scholastic News which is that little magazine that you used to get on your on your desk and in your classroom that gave you news during that um during that time I had to interview everyone the first day at work we had to call NASA and we had to call the White House which is I get the guess the scariest people that they could come up with but we had to interview sports stars and film star

s and politicians and authors and scientists and I very quickly snarfed all the science gigs because I real realized that I liked talking to scientists the most they were excited about everything that they were doing they were grateful to have somebody writing about their work and they were patient with me as I tried to understand what they were doing I had a limited but Rich Science Background mostly based in experience very little formal Science Education and what I did just kind of by the ski

n of my teeth by pushing myself in doorways literally these are some of the books that I've come up with and you can see that there is um more non-fiction Than Fiction and more ocean science than anything else although I'm interested in a great many things this is um what my studio looks like when it's neat and well cared for which is very small percentage of the time Lots going on all the time I am a visual person I don't do well with files in drawers I need to have everything out where I can s

ee it and visuals are really important to me for more reasons than that I just like pretty pictures I tell a lot of stories through pictures and this is just one example of one I chose this as something to introduce the idea of Antarctica which I'm going to be talking about next and um placing it in the center which which is really where it should be you know not at the bottom of your globe with that screw thing going through it or on some Globes if you take a look it doesn't even bother putting

Antarctica on there you know it's just like this blank space at the bottom but since we have really just one ocean not Seven Seas or four oceans or whatever people say it's really all connected this might be what it looked like if we placed Antarctica at the S at the center it's all the way you look at things I start off with an O and that brings me to our first drawing exercise would you please very quickly draw a cat and so that we're not just sitting here with dead air while you're drawing I

'll read you a lovely poem go right ahead and draw your cat keys why you should carry two pens be told the mind is not your friend Business Like You stride along while your mind Snuffles beside the path distracted by odors and ghosts it brings you sticks burrito wrappers bones baby rabbits a new idea you feel you ought to write it down but you're late for work or nearly home or feel pretentious stopping to write and your mind says I'll remember that those words are the sound forgetting makes dee

p in the basement of your brain there the cre creaking hinge on the trap door above the alligators you have 30 seconds to write down your good idea before it's gone forever yet it can be worse I couldn't forget that means you have 10 seconds tops go grab a pen from a stranger write it on your hand your shirt the baby everything goes sooner or later save what you can in the dark the alligators do that's by Susan Ramsay published in smartish place so we're going to stay on this for a second if you

have donon a cat you may have one of the following feelings you may feel that you are the world's greatest artist and that no one could fail to recognize that your drawing was a cat you may be the world's worst artist and maybe at best have to drawn a round something with two little triangles attached and if you were thinking carefully maybe an s-shaped tail of it what I want you to notice is how you felt drawing when you got to something that you weren't sure what it looked like or weren't sur

e of your ability to recreate what it looked like and we'll come back to this but for now we're going to Antarctica Palmer station on the Antarctic Peninsula if you were to hold your left hand up with your hand with your fingers in a fist and your thumb pointing upward to represent the Antarctic Peninsula and your knuckles representing the transantarctic mountains Palmer station is out on the end of your thumb well not quite on the end but it's out there really a thousand or more miles or kilome

ters from just about anywhere you could come up with what was I doing there I was there on an Antarctic artist and writers program Grant from the National Science Foundation and I was there with a team of scientists who were studying invisible stuff phytoplankton in the ocean that required a microscope to look at it and they hired me to draw invisible stuff um and to try to convey their science to the general public as part of that famous broader impacts part of their National Science Foundation

Grant so I drew everything that I could see and a whole lot of things that I couldn't see more drawing I'm requesting from you now would you please draw an alligator any way possible and please this time notice your feelings as you're drawing when you get to the part where you don't know what it looks like you can fake it or you can leave it blank but either way notice that part because that's what scientists do pay attention to what they don't know and I'll read you a poem again so we don't ha

ve too much quiet the diver's clothes lying empty you are sitting here with us but you're also out walking in a field at dawn you are yourself the animal we hunt when you come with us on the hunt you are in your body like a plant is solid in the ground yet you are wind you are the diver's clothes lying empty on the beach you are the fish in the ocean are many bright strands and many dark strands like veins that are seen when a wing is lifted up your hidden himself is blood in those those veins t

hat are loot strings that make ocean music not the sad edge of surf but the sound of no Shore and that's by roomie translated by Coleman Banks this is Palmer station and a photograph I took from the back of the LM Gould which was our transport boat that took us to the Antarctic peninsula I didn't have any idea what I was looking at I could tell that there were fuel tanks I could tell that there were boats I could tell that there were buildings in antenna and that's about as far as I got so I beg

an to draw it this is what I do when I get into a new situation or into a new place and I really know how you might have felt drawing the alligator when you got to whatever part it was that puzzled you the tail the teeth those bumps on the end of its snout I don't know whatever I don't think even though I've thought about drawing alligators a lot that I could just draw one and have it look really recognizable how do the feet go when I get to a new situation in science because I haven't had a hug

e background I really have to C into use my superpowers and I will quantify that superpower a little bit further on but you may be getting the idea of what it might be I am working very hard to get myself comfortable in a place where I may or may not feel like a total ignoramus I find myself in that place a lot and drawing is often my answer to it dog use your ignorance that's what scientists do I took my black and white drawing and I walked around the whole thing it's only about as big as a sma

ll town it's much smaller than your college campus and it has a few buildings that it has about 50 people I talked to everyone there about who they were what they were doing what went on in their building how long they'd been there what's the name of every boat where does this pipe go what's this little shed for out here what are the names of the mountains in the background are they mountains or are they glaciers how do you tell the difference what are the animals that are in the water that you

can't see what are the birds that are flying by and I don't know what they are all of these things made it into this piece of art that became a poster that's actually now still down at Palmer station but um this is how I use what I don't know I really figure out what I don't know and I go and find out as much as I can o plus du goes another animal for you to draw please anything you want really anything you want but don't um well actually you're going to draw as many parts as you can but you're

not going to actually name them um snout or tail or claws or Paws or whatever they are instead you're going to name them for their function okay questions or Mysteries Clues lead to Solutions see what your questions are and see if you can answer it with what you already know or have observed about this animal and once again I will Rec with a beautiful poem last August hours before the year 2000 spun silk of Mercy long limed afternoon sun urging purple blossoms from baked stems what better blessi

ng than to move without hurry under trees lugging a bucket to the rose that became a Twining house by now roof and walls of Vine you could live inside this Rose pouring a slow stream around the ancient pineapple crowned with spiky fruit I thought we would feel old by the year 2000 Walt Disney thought cars would fly what a drama to keep thinking the last summer the last birthday before the calendar turns to zeros my neighbor says anything we plant in September takes hold she's lining pots of litt

le grasses by her walk I want to know the root goes deep on all that came before you could lay a soaker hose across your whole life and know there was something under layers of packed summer Earth and dry blown grass to moisten Naomi shab n so how did you do with labeling your animals this is the part of the webinar where I would really love to be able to open it up and hear what people answer because they answer such genius such funny things when asked to Simply describe the function of of the

body part of an animal or of a person and once again when you go into a new situation as a scientist or as a human being and you see something that you don't know is it necessary to feel shaky is it necessary to feel like an ignoramus or can you turn it around and say my question will lead me forward to new research my question will lead me forward to new knowledge part of what I've had to do an enormous part of what I've had to do in turning my non-scientist self into a science writer who could

turn around and explain things to children or to the general public or even to other scientists God help me was to embrace my discomfort with what I did not know and to see it as the Horizon to where I might get to now you know what my superpower is I bet you thought the D stood for doodling but it stands for duh that sinking feeling that no matter how fascinated thrilled or engaged I am I just don't get it don't really understand not the way Pete Patty or Carlton does those are the team of sci

entists that I accompanied to Palmer station not enough to be a scientist but maybe enough for me so please share with me in science what makes you feel a bit dumb so I have a regular science comic that came out of my trips to Antarctica called Antarctic log it has to do with climate change with climate research um with anything to do with Antarctica the Arctic or any place where climate research is taking place place as well as education activism policy that has to do with it and when I push pu

t this comic out in the summer of 2018 I got many many responses I don't know who reads this comic kids do parents apparently some PhD scientists because they wrote to me all kinds of different really wonderful things I will show you the resulting comic and a few and a few more images but I'm going to share a few of my really big dah moments duh not do I was on a ship in the Arctic and I was sitting next to this guy whose name is Sam Laney and he's a biology biologist at Woods Hole oceanographic

institution and this machine was down in the basement the basement down in the um in the hull of our ship and I sat looking at it and that was a big duh moment but I started to really say okay don't wig out think about what you can see what do you know by looking at this and I could see that there was a pump involved that there was water coming through the hole and somehow channeling through this machine that there was a laser in there someplace and by sitting next to Sam up in um up in the lab

I could see that what he was looking at was phytoplankton datom all kinds of stuff that was was going by and he would just sit there very calmly and every once in a while he'd say well that's a such and such well I have no idea what that is and it was just an amazing thing because when he started explaining it to me eventually I found out that it was okay a machine that pumped water past a laser and the laser could identify something solid going by even if it was microscopic and it could blow i

t up so he could see it on his screen and that he was just watching the waterf flow and using his knowledge of fight of Plankton to figure out what he was seeing and over and over and over he was seeing things that he didn't have any idea what they were and he was happier with every time a new one came by because he was making discoveries of fantastic so I have this perfect model sitting next to me of somebody who's experiencing this great big duh and it's the happiest moment of his life and I r

eally tried to take that on board and say okay this is what happens this is how we move forward from the known to the unknown I'm not going to ask you to do this but I share you I share this with you because when I do work with artists and by that I mean kids who are considering moving into science and art fields and who love both but aren't really sure what they're going to do to start off drawing in an animal start off with what you already know about it that you're excited to tell us and then

figure out what you don't know because that's going to give you your pathway to go forward kids sit in classrooms all the time being asked to write reports being asked to write essays and sitting there going I don't know what to write about without actually going through the process that scientists go through when they're trying to figure out what they want to study about what they want to research about you got to walk right up to the line of where you're uncomfortable where you don't know som

ething and figure out what it is and by this time if we've gone through all of these different drawing exercises as a classroom they've started to embrace what they don't know to look for it and to write it down and not to care that they don't know something and not to feel stupid about it but to go off looking for the new thing and to be ready to report back this is a really good strong starting point for anyone whether they're a scientist or whether they're a kid who wants to draw or to learn

about new things I drew this thing on another ship aboard Nautilus um this is a remotely operated vehicle called Hercules and when I first drew it it looked kind of like that picture of Palmer station it was just all black lines nothing was labeled I didn't know what anything was but again as with Sam Laney's machine I could look at this machine and say okay well that's a camera well that's a light well that's a pipe or a hose so there must be something liquid going through it those are obviousl

y claws that can reach down and pick something up and I don't know why the claws are different shapes but I I know about crabs and I know a crab has one thing that it one claw that it picks up something and the other one that it pulls the meat out of whatever it is and so I started to figure things out I didn't know things like why is there a little Penguin on this or why is there a little tiki statue and when I took this drawing with none of the labels to some of the engineers that were aboard

the ship and began to ask them questions I found out what all the stuff was and also found out some of the lore behind Hercules such as that the person who was the youngest or the lowest status aboard any ship has to oil the tiki before it Dives such that one of the people who is involved in studying deep ocean vents also studies Antarctica because that's where extremophile organisms live both of those two places and that's why there was a penguin on this ROV that is set up to go down to the dee

p ocean so once again I'm having a good time I'm getting to do art I'm getting to do writing I'm getting to talk to scientists and I'm embracing my du and turning it into a do or an O what's so great about drawing I think I've already made some of it clear how it can really help you to figure out what's going on but here are a few more examples this is um actually the um algae scientist that I was just talking to you about theia this is Sabrina Heiser um and she's a diver in anarctica and I said

how do you do this what are you wearing how are you surviving these cold temperatures what are you looking for and Sabrina went through her whole outfit and told me every single thing that she was wearing and you know I found it very exciting to label everything to draw everything and then to turn around and share it and you will too if you employ this method for doing some research and so will any artist or writer including your kids and your students I did a comic series for a children's maga

zine called Odyssey um for four years this was in print before moving on to mostly digital stuff it was always about um research that was being done on a particular animal or on a particular situation and what I found out about it really quickly even though the drawlings look somewhat childish or like something that would appeal to a child there's a lot going on on just a sheet of paper everything from um a human experience with a pet that has had an an encounter with a wild animal to a title th

at looks like the wild animal there's Behavior here there's physiology here there is um a chart that shows all the different species there is mention of a person who studies skunks for a living and his experience is raising baby skunks there is an awful lot of material that can be shared through just drawing and labeling and it's a lot easier than writing a report and it's a lot more interesting to read than a report so I have embraced this method and I've taught it to a lot of teachers who sit

in workshops and do them themselves and fall in love and turn around and share it with their kids here's some of the results this one may look simple and it may look like it's not just about any one animal she decided to write about a whole lot of different things but in every cell of this comic there's something that I didn't know I don't know what cave slime is I don't know what an m is I'm not sure I know whether or not SE slogs can make chlorophyll when they hatch from their shells it's thei

r shells their eggs um but this kid's figuring it out by going along and she's not the least bit worried by her blank spaces of her paper as you might sometimes be freaked out by having a blank page that you're supposed to write on this one has a lot of blank space and you might think go well this child did not finish at all but look at all the information that's here here not only have you got information about all of the Sharks physiology but you've got the Latin name you've got the common nam

e you've got weight and I bet that this kid knows what he's going to write about next because he's experienced all of this may not be finished but there's a lot going on and he knows where his unknown is and he knows what story he wants to tell this one's about um uh Dumbo octopus and about other things that live in the deep ocean if you just scan over this you see so much information from the shades of the um octopus it's morphology what different colors it might come in to again the um the Lat

in name and to how they named it and to who named it and to who researched it and why she got the privilege of naming it on and on as well as little jokes and little puns which are so helpful in education be an expert talking about octopus eggs um and so on like that and that they're all waiting on the baby O's to be born just cute just funny by creating a comic she can really put some of her personality into her work and it's not just a dry report that anyone could have you know copied or um yo

u know written on their own anyone else who wrote about a dumbbell octopus would probably have come up with a very different page of of work don't you think another one that is much more aligned with um our earlier assignment of um trying to match up the parts of an animal with their function as well as finding out what they're called but really looking at them first and figuring out what they do I want I think that it's worth mentioning that MIT has a freshman course in doodling in order to rea

lly establish whether the Doodles that scientists are making are representing the science Concepts that they're trying to portray they did a a study first um where they went around to science conferences and picked up all the napkins after the cocktail session that scientists had had been scribbling on to explain themselves to one another and then they went back to the scientists and said what were we trying to do what were we trying to show and found that very often their drawings really didn't

represent very well and that they could harness this as a way of communicating better to themselves and I think they wound up with some good Outreach pieces or education pieces at the same time this is from a professional doodler of all things named Sunny brown one of those people who goes into conferences and doodles what everyone's talking about on the wall and she talks about some of the research that's been done with drawing and people who are allowed to or encouraged to draw while trying t

o learn and here are some of the things that come out of drawing be encouraged to draw being encouraged to find out what you don't know through drawing and then applying it to your writing so back to Antarctica this is the cover of my last book Antarctica the melting continent not um illustrated by me illustrated by the wonderful Angela Shay who actually put me in the book drawing which is what I was down there to do I cut my hair since then this is my drawing of U when I was trying to understan

d this vast backpack thing full of clothing that we were issued when we were going to Antarctica what do we need all these clothes for I cataloged not only our science team Patty mry Carlton renberg and Pete countway from the Bigalow laboratory of for ocean Sciences in Maine but everything that we all had been issued to wear figuring out when we would need to wear it was a different matter Al together but that was the next piece of um that was the next Horizon right and Angela used me once again

and some of these drawings to show how we get ready to go outside um in Antarctica in all the different situations that's in this book here we all are going out in all our stuff to work in the kind of weather that you picked your Antarctica having it was always foggy on the ocean we couldn't we see everything including the massive icebergs but we had time to Poe for hero shots this is Pete countway who was our fearless leader studying the phyto Plankton and this is a video showing Pete and me d

oing what we did when we went out to gather water that easy so as I said we were gathering invisible stuff we were gathering phop Plankton from 5 meters down and we were bringing it back on Shore and putting it into this machine that was assembled um by us at Palmer station called an echosat machine one of the reasons that I was there was because Patty the scientist shown in the middle got too seasick to handle working on that small boat so that was part of my job so the eoat was set up to rock

the water it rocked the water and was in the sunlight and in the temperature that the ocean water was in so that they could see over time what the fight Plankton did what their life cycle was so this is what it looks like and it's outside here we are this is my um my drawing of our process and grabbing it and the bottom left should look familiar from that video um and I figured out how to draw it from the ocean point of view in the middle bottom we would pull the water back into these big car bo

ys and bring it back into our lab and this is the echo stat being said up and uh long long past this point once the the phop Plankton have gone through their life cycle Pete was doing RNA analysis on them inside the lab there that's Pete I was filtering the water before that I realize I have this somewhat out of order but I would filter the water so that you got all mostly the water out of it and left the phytoplankton in and then Pete was doing the RNA analysis on it to find out what it was doi

ng and I was drawing again all of the equipment all of the situation where we got the um the water from and with where we got the phop Plankton from and what it's all happening and then very at the very end of it here's penguin Pete with his little suitcase carrying his samples um back to the lab in Maine um that I have labeled and carefully put all the filters inside so that he can do all of his analysis so this is how we draw invisible comics of invisible stuff this was my desk um at Palmer st

ation just doing a lot of artwork plugging along a lot of magic markers and things and drawing everything I took another trip the following year more invisible stuff Not only was was it invisible but it was ancient and had to be we had to go to great efforts to bring um it in this time we didn't go anywhere close to shore we were 100 miles out in the aminon sea from the th Glacier the so-called doomsday Glacier um which we know melted about 10,000 13,000 years ago and by drilling up sediment fro

m the shore from the the seafloor we could tell what had happened to the THS Glacier in early times we could do that by using a drill this is the J resolution which was an oil ship that's been um recommissioned as a research ship that Derek in the middle the big tower um supports the sending down of a huge noodle of pipe that goes all the way down into the sea floor and brings up sediment so you can see the thit glacier um off to the left um and we've come down off the peninsula and onto um the

shelves of West Antarctica here comes the core that has been drilled up but not for a few days first we had to get there and while we were getting there I was confronted by a real duh moment of I don't really know what they're doing with this sediment there's this huge lab here don't really know what they're going to do what all these people's different roles are they're all telling me I'm a magnetic paleontologist I'm a microbiologist I'm a this I'm a that and I'm going okay well what is all th

at have to do with all this different sediment the answer came this is what they would do when they got the core they would be describing it as they said what they were doing um doing all kinds of testing on it doing all kinds of um I don't know like what I said testing or something on it I don't know what they're going to do not really but it was my lucky day because someone had given me a fruit cake recently a fruit cake had been found in shackleton's Hut near McMurdo base another research sta

tion in Antarctica it was a hundred years old exactly and still edible apparently and this friend who um is another science writer named llie bullon made me a fruit cake and said you've got to take this to Antarctica they need a new one so we decided that fruit cake had a lot to in common with sediment that it was kind of Muddy looking and it had things in it and that people might be able to use it not only to explain what they were going to be looking for in the sediment but to actually use a f

ruit cake as a model for them all learning their own roles in the lab so we made a core of fruit cake and we put fruit cake on a slide and looked at it under the microscope and we matched its color which tells a lot to them to them about what they're looking at and then I made a comic about the fruit cake I made a four a four comic comic showing all the different things that they were going to be looking at from density to core Matrix colors to a smear slide to clasps to all kinds of new vocabul

ary that I didn't know because of finding out something through using what I did not know the superpower again so back to the superpower idea what makes you feel dumb people responded the metric system chemistry math genetics period metagenomic DNA photosynthesis electricity how does the telephone work airplanes flight all these different things and finally someone just said to me I feel dumb around science almost every day that is I feel barely smart enough to discover the boundaries of my igno

rance which is a necessary first step to knowledge then I started thinking about what made me feel particularly dumb when I was a kid and it was that question that they always ask you what do you want to be when you grow up and I saw you know I don't really know I know what I'm interested in but I don't have any idea what that leads to and that the combination of my dumbness about that and scientists telling me that there wasn't there weren't enough perspectives in science that people were too m

uch the same but that the world is very different and that if we could get more different people into the scientist Sciences it would be better so I created this project called I was a kid to talk to scientists about what they were like as kids and to really seek out people who represented under represented communities or groups and to portray them in such a way that kids who represented those communities would so welcome for example Catalina Martinez this is what a page of the I was a kid websi

te looks like there is a big comic that is a lot of her thoughts about how she got to be where she is from being um a little kid a um Cuban immigrant living in Providence Rhode Island um with a bunch of cousins and not very much money and how she got to be um not only an expert on diversity but a research scientist in her own right um and she is sitting on top of that submarine that with the ROV pardon me the submersible Hercules that we saw earlier because they're going to go and use that for s

ome diving so uh I was a kid uses audio photographs of children so that they can identify with them Comics as well as here's the comic again the big comic as well as text and aign post that shows the different um turning points along Catalina's path and then in text how she handled each one there's also a try this section where she talks about um programs and opportunities that she took advantage of when she was a kid or that as today as an adult she's been um part of creating so that kids on th

eir way up can have something to participate in so each of the close to 50 people now on the Iowa kid website is represented with this kind of portrait here are a few more and I included Bridget because she is an artist as well that's my signal to to wrap it up so I will here are some of the many different childhood photographs of the people who are involved when I was a kid some of their um their roles now some of them are students some of them are teachers some of them are artists some of them

are doctors phds graduate students undergrads all the different disciplines that I can come up with so far it was a fantasy dream but I made it a reality is a a young a young man the father of single father of three kyani a Navajo man who was an intern at JPL and the point of all of this is to change the way that kids draw scientists the way that they consider their own Futures and their own potential to go into the scientist and contribute their ignorance and then their knowledge to the fields

and I will flash through a couple of um when they've seen I was a kid the inspiration that um kids have had to go out and find the people who are working in the Sciences in their own um circles their families their friends or to talk about people in history who represent minorities to really say everybody's here and everybody has a place here and just a few more snapshots of those folks be curious and open-minded and willing to learn and grow and I hope that you can be and that and I hope that

you will not criticize yourself for your dumb moments and go off to find your Smart Ones thank you so much um need to figure out how to escape now okay thank you so much Karen I'm going to kick off the questions uh and the first question from our audiences uh were you always artistic growing up did you want to do something that utilized your art skills I was I I liked to draw I wouldn't ever have described myself as an as artistic however there Comes A Time in every life when you look around at

everyone else and somebody's a better artist than you so you quit right and you start saying I'm not creative I'm not good enough I'm not going to do this what I found out as I gone on and went away from drawing completely for years maybe 20 years and then came back to it one Sunday afternoon when I was just kind of sick of myself and started drawing whatever was around me and thought okay that was not so bad let me try that every Sunday for a while and after a while started feeling like I wante

d to draw something to go with one of the stories that I was working on I think it's important to to forgive yourself and I think it's important to um recognize that were all somewhere on a Continuum you know I might not be as good as you but you might not be as good as me and there might be different ways of looking at this in different ways of being good so I have tried to encourage myself and keep on going and not get too upset about what I where I have not been able to go yet Kon thanks for

a very interesting talk I've discovered that I'm better at drawing cats than crocodiles another question um so we have some teachers in the room including us University teachers where could we find information about your workshops um on Karen Romano young.com all right great thanks I'll pass it back to see you okay Karen this is wonderful but what strategies do you suggest for faculty who are hopeless when it comes to drawing how can I use this powerful method that I can't really demonstrate so

pleased to see and hear you today Irv Levy luro 76 lllo excuse me oh my gosh hi f f is one of my dear friends when I was in high school and I haven't heard from him a while that's so funny um how can you apply this to how you can't draw okay um Irv I happen to know that you can play the piano and sing so there's going to be something that you can do to convey this you know I've been talking about art and my drawing but why not make it funny and I know you know how to do that too and why not um m

ake a song about it all of these things um that might make people laugh or see something in a different way can be useful I also don't think it's important that you know how to draw remember the whole um the thing about drawing the body parts without knowing what they were if you were doing that with a human you would just draw a stick figure and it wouldn't matter bit you know it doesn't matter if the hand looks all beautiful or you know you could just draw sticks like that um and I and I don't

think that it really matters it is my way of looking at things it is my Pathway to finding out what I don't know but all you're really trying to come up with is the questions I mean I could have just sat and stared at Sam lany's machine in the hole of the ship and then gone back to him and said look I can tell it has something to do with light and water but what's the light doing with the water and you know it's a way of shaping your questions that's all but drawing I have to say as with music

as with anything that you do to try to create a connection with people can open the door to asking those questions and make them see you in a different way and not just somebody hanging around their lab trying to figure out what they're doing ask the questions have the conversation I'll tell you one thing that I learned in my early days of Scholastic which is that there's nobody who likes to talk about their work more than scientists because there's nobody who gets asked less about it so open th

e door to those conversations then they will they will come through love your Earth Karen another question for you can you tell us more about your upcoming book about the galapagus: I mean fly on a plane get on a boat and leave and I said I'm not going to be able to do that so I took one of the little tours and just found it to be an extraordinary place not only in the obvious things of tortoises and the landscape and volcanoes and everything but just in the way that people talked about it um I

was fascinated that our tour guide was required to be a native born Galapago in order to talk about it and that they would had that had not always been the case I was interested to hear that they were trying to get gagano education into their schools even though they're part of Ecuador they didn't just have to learn Ecuadorian history anymore which was all they used to have so you had kids who lived on these islands who couldn't swim who'd never been off the island to look back at it who didn't

know it lived in the water and weren't in any position to grow up and husband it all sted it properly and so they've tried to to change that and and um it's been really interesting to me to see what happens in a place where they really are trying not only to control things and to keep things sustainable but to maybe Inspire other places um to create a relationship with the people who live there thank you yeah I have another comment and question wonderful presentation when growing up did you expe

rience nature in some ways with your family like going on hikes camping biking canoeing just wondering because you seem to have a deep appreciation of nature that's nice thank you I literally grew up on the beach um we grew up in Fairfield Connecticut and um there was a Long Island Sound Beach there and my mother would take us there at 800 in the morning and not take us home till 11 o'clock at night and when we went on vacation we always went back to where she had gone on vacation as a child her

self which was Ocean City Maryland one of the first things that I learned as a kid was how to tell what tide it was I always knew whether it was going in or out I always knew what moon it was because we were always at the beach when the moon was rising or why is it really dark because it's the new moon so a lot of just experiencing everything but I also lived right down this street from a river and we were just you know we were kind of feral and we were out in the in the river all the time and w

alking on the ice when we shouldn't have been and walking in the water in February to see if we could survive it and all this kind of thing and I met a woman who um named Joy Shaw who still is in Fairfield living in the Old Mill and who took it upon herself to teach every fifth grader in our town of Fairfield about our River um all the way from its source um to Long Island Sound and um that's where my interest in science came from was those two experiences like I said I had little formal Science

Education I didn't have a formal science class till I was in sixth grade and I was significantly behind at that age behind enough that when I went to Junior High they tracked me low and it made me mad because I knew that I was higher in math and higher in English and higher in social studies so why was I I'm sorry with these other kids when I was in science you know and so I started fighting my way into science rooms where I thought more interesting things were going on or where the expectation

s were higher um and I was told no a lot um so but I weeded my way in and I'm still weedling my way and I'm still saying no I don't have a PhD no I didn't even major in a science you know but I can learn on my feet everything I know I've learned on my feet thanks Karen there two follow on follow on questions from the two question just asked you so I'll follow on with the person who asked the first one your book on the Galacticus island is it primarily about people or animals or a mix it's everyt

hing yeah I mean you have and it's about Darwin you know of of course it is because there weren't that many people they haven't been able to ascertain that there were people at all in the Galapagos before anyone came from Land you know from from the continents is what I mean to say um they really haven't found much evidence of that um and so when Darwin came with his knowledge you know of Western science at the time it really did make a huge impact and his findings really brought a lot of people

to those islands um just to study you know Pirates had a big impact too you know um and so the different ways that people used these islands were really interesting to me and of course most of it is uninhabited only 3% of the land actually has people on it so you're going to have to talk about the animals and the environment but so many people um had interactions with that that that was what was fascinating to me great thank you thank you this is um more of a comment than a question but I'll re

ad it um I'd like to offer something I learned that was useful as a freshman long ago at Bowling Green State University where I was an undergrad and it helped me taking notes all through graduate school and throughout my entire teaching career to carry multiple ballpoint pens of at least two colors preferably more my professors used colored chalk to draw in their lectures and I wanted color for my notes for all of my years as a student there were only chalk boards in the classroom now I have man

y colored dry markers for my diagrams and my science lectures that's wonderful thank you so much I think that writing um how you write has a big impact on your notes and that if you free yourself you don't say it has to be any particular way do what works for you whether it's a drawing or a write you know or writing and I I'll tell you whenever I did one of those titles like the skunk title that looked like the skunk Tales um you can tell that that's the point in my writing or my creating a comi

c where I didn't know what came next so I sat there and Drew some really detailed drawing and by the time I got to the end of it I would I would know where I was going next so sometimes just switching back and forth from color to color or from drawing to writing can really help your mind forward thank you so much I love that Karen I think we have time for one more question and it's just popped into the Q&A box so the question reads what root what would what root would you recommend for someone w

ho has a background in biology who wants to communicate through ART and through writing like you have done so if our students graduate with a BS biology how can they pursue a career like you I would take all the writing classes that you can now for me that wasn't n very many um there weren't there wasn't that much offered in my in my college um outside of the journalism school which I was not in so I took writing for management I took writing for Library studies just whatever would give me a cha

nce to see other people's writing which is really important um and what would give me um feedback from a teacher what or from the other student which was really important or just the idea of aign assignments you know write a 500 page article word word article or you know create a diagram or just write captions you know all of those different little methods really found that helped me to understand how I wanted to write um art is a similar thing It's Tricky when you're in college you're trying to

major in BIO and the classes are Monday Wednesday Friday and the art studios are you know Tuesday Friday or something something and you have you know you have to kind of cut one class and go to the other which is also how I spent a lot of my time cutting science or and going to Art Studio it's a matter of just finding the opportunities um and you and and you will you know I know a lot of scientists who also use their art um in some way they're doing you know crocheting or they're they're doing

photography or they're making videos and you know their Tik Tok is Big there's so many ways now and there are a lot more writing courses in colleges you might even find a science writing course thank you again for everything it's been very informative and we can't wait to implement this in BIO society as well and hopefully we can use this as a resource for all students and we can kind of team together with faculty on this um thank you everyone else for joining us today as well thank you all so m

uch it's been a pleasure stay safe in the snow