Joshua Valeri
Undergraduate Fellow
“I’m on the Science Communication team with Suzanne Loui and I’m working on the Humans of Tyson project and an independent project. That means interviewing people, getting a transcription of the interview, and editing it down into a profile for the project. My independent project is to create a video. My inspiration for that was actually watching a lot of explainer videos on YouTube or Netflix that take a topic people might not know a lot about, and explain it in a digestible way. As someone who’s interested in science, science communication, and communication in general, it’s appealing because a lot of the times important topics are inaccessible to most people. They’re made inaccessible by language that’s too complicated or mediums, such as scientific papers, that are just not things most people have access to or are interested in reading.
I hope that a lot of people will be able to see the video and will learn about Rachel’s research from it. But, on a broader scale, I think the importance of [the project] is that using videos to communicate science makes that science more accessible. Learning to use the medium of video to communicate science is something that’s necessary.”
How has your work been adapted due to COVID-19?
“I think our team has been lucky in that we can do pretty much everything we were initially going to do. The vast majority of what we were initially going to do is doable remotely. We’ve still been able to do Humans of Tyson and our independent projects.
I do think the big loss that everyone is experiencing is not being able to see people in person, not being outside or experiencing the community. Those were both things that really drew me to Tyson.”