She's a Brainiac

What do you do for Popular Science?

I have a few main tasks. One of them is to help develop the infographics and scientific illustrations that go into the magazine's feature well. That involves me learning about the science or technology and then translating the words and concepts into something visually compelling. Sometimes a technology can seem like it would be boring or complicated, but I have to turn it into something interesting that the average person would understand.

I'm also a features editor, and occasionally I have to coach my colleagues about science. For instance, one editor had to go on WNYC yesterday and talk about the most recent climate-change conference in Denmark. He was a little nervous about understanding greenhouse gases, so I had to walk him through atmospheric chemistry. Basically, I'm the staff nerd.

How long have you been working there?

I started as a freelance fact checker in 2002, and I got hired in 2003.

What did you study in school?

I have undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry, and I also studied French. And I started a PhD, but didn't finish it. My graduate work was in physical chemistry, where you look at how molecules behave under certain conditions, and figure out how you can alter those molecules so that they organize themselves the way you want them to.  I really liked it—it wasn't what I set out to study but it was what I ended up with. But that's the great thing about science for me—so much of it is interesting, I'd be happy doing just about anything, except running electrophoresis gels day in and day out. I always hated running gels.

How did you make the transition to PopSci?

Well, I moved to New York and slept on a couch for four months. Hahaha! I got in touch with a former features editor at Popular Science, who was an acquaintance of mine, and she offered me a fact-checking job. I established myself as a person who can explain difficult science, from a fairly broad selection of disciplines, so a regular person can understand it. I used to teach a lot while at university and in grad school, so I took that experience and applied some of those techniques to my job.  It's tough for me, though, because words that editors think are jargon are really meaningful to scientists. Having to learn where not to use them was hard.

What's the most fun part of your job?

I love sitting down with the editors as a feature is coming in and imagining how I'm going to attack their topic visually. I read a lot of comic books because comic book artists are really good at condensing a lot of information into a single panel. A lot of scientific processes are multistep, so I take the processes that comic-book artists use and apply those same principles to illustrating a scientific idea.

The other thing I really like is when the illustrations come in and everyone stands around and says, "Wow, that turned out better than I expected."

Sometimes the illustrators come up with better ideas than I do, so I like working on an idea with them. I'm not a trained artist, so often they have better ideas in their mental palette. They also come up with details I wouldn't have thought of. And sometimes the artists try to play pranks on us: We commissioned an illustration for the May issue—a cutaway of a commercial airliner.  There were two people, locked in an embrace, depicted in one of the bathrooms. The artist put that in there to be funny and to see if we'd notice. No, it's not in the final draft.

What's the hardest part?

Not getting discouraged. Because of the medium and the level of information we're trying to present, there is legitimate science we really just can't fit in. Also, there are so many working parts, and so many places for possible miscommunications. I usually try to get in touch with the source for each project—usually an inventor or scientist. Then there's a translation process between the source and me, me and the editor, me and the art director, the art director and the artist... there's so many things going on, it can be challenging to keep track of it all.

What do you do for fun when you're not working?

I drink heavily. Just kidding. I cook a lot—current obsessions include making my own bitters and smoking my own bacon, I travel and I birdwatch (yes, for reals). I read a lot of speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and horror. These authors can address serious issues without all the baggage that people would bring to it if you set something in the "real" world. You can imagine what a militantly matriarchal society might look like after a thousand-year reign. You can look at racism or gender constructs in a new light. Or, if we have widespread human genetic engineering, what would be a logical consequence of that, and so on. 

I happen to know that as a chemist you've also applied your skills to mixology.

Yeah, I got into cocktails because I had a string of really bad Manhattans a few years ago. So my partner Doug and I started researching the history of cocktails. Fifteen years ago people didn't know what ingredients went into historical absinthe, so scientists like Ted Breaux started putting 19th-century absinthe through gas chromatograph-mass spectrometers and stuff to find out what was in there. So that's where my interest in cocktails emerged. Trying to understand defunct ingredients. Prohibition almost killed some good alcohol, like rye whiskey. Happily, many are making a comeback.

When Doug and I invent new cocktails, we first need to look at what has come before, and we need to understand, ok, these ten different bottles of booze are all similar to this one ingredient. Then we can invent around that. For example, Campari is an Italian potable bitter, and is used in such classic drinks as the Negroni (equal parts gin, sweet vermouth and Campari). But there are a lot of other Italian potable bitters out there (Cynar, Meletti, Aperol, and the like), and they can all be used in similar ways to Campari. If your recipe is different enough from everything out there, it qualifies as a new cocktail.

What scientific mystery would you like to solve?

I want to know what the "bloop" is at the bottom of the ocean. The noise comes from the same general area where the mythical Cthulhu (from the mythos the devised by science-fiction/horror author H.P. Lovecraft) was supposedly buried in the city of R'lyeh, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. People who like cryptozoology really get into this shit. The nerd in me loves it.

And obviously the protein-folding and proteome problem is really interesting.

Obviously?

Okay, so proteins basically dictate or mediate all of our cellular processes—all of life, really. But understanding how those proteins interact to create a specific outcome—say, how a cell turns from normal to cancerous, is very poorly understood. Worse, for the scientist trying to understand molecular behavior, proteins are really huge molecules. Well, they're tiny to our eyes but they're really big and floppy structures on a microscopic level. And they don't really work unless they're properly folded. Their shape dictates their function. You know how when you fold a map it can be really hard to do it in the right way to fit into your glove compartment? Well, proteins are the same way. Scientists are trying to figure out how these huge floppy annoying things adopt the proper 3-D shape. If scientists could unfurl the proteins and then predict how they—and similar proteins—would fold, then scientists could synthesize analogues and be able to make new drugs to target proteins that have gone wrong in a specific illness. Misfolded proteins are a major factor in many diseases, like cystic fibrosis or mad cow disease.

Do you ever turn off your gigantic brain?

Hahaha! No, not really. Maybe when I'm listening to music. I analyze things less then because I'm not a musician myself and don't have the language to really dissect what I hear. I usually don't get beyond "that song has some awesome drumming in it" or "this is the heaviest shit I've heard in weeks."