"Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works." -Carl Sagan
Outreach and Public Engagement :
Science is not truly science when it is not communicated broadly to the community. When I am not on the front-lines doing the science or teaching and mentoring students to uncover the universe's secrets, you may find me talking to the public to inspire others to think scientifically. Here are some of the occasional talks I have given that happen to be recorded.
Public Lecture at the Aspen Center for Physics (July 2023):
Figure from Cartography Reveals the Milky Way’s Spiral Arms": Have you ever found yourself wondering if the artist impression of our spiral galaxy was right? ... well me too. Like the first human explorers, I have spent years creating better and better maps of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. As a Galactic cartographer, I built a map our Galaxy 10,000s of light years wide and found its spiral arms using the chemistry of the stars that trace it. The figure shows an artist impression of the Galaxy and laid on top is data from the Gaia spacecraft. Blue regions are those which have stars that are more metal-poor than their neighbors while redder regions are those where the stars are more metal-rich than their neighbors. The spiral regions (black lines) tend to be more metal-rich than the regions around them.
