I’m a writer, a songwriter and a scientist. I earned a Ph.D. in astronomy in 2001 from Caltech and I’ve worked as an astrophysicist for Harvard, Princeton and NASA. Planets, young stars, Kuiper Belt objects, brown dwarfs, supernovae, disks, dust…my specialties.
One cloudy night at the telescope, I grabbed a guitar and started writing songs. Some of my songs have been covered by aspiring pop and country artists and appeared on VH1, MTV, BET, and PBS.
Younger scientists started asking me to mentor them. But I didn’t know how. So I collected all the advice I could gather into a book called: Marketing for Scientists: How to Shine In Tough Times (Island Press 2011). It’s a guide to help researchers share the joy of discovery while building their careers.
Now I have two fascinating children, so I write books for them–and any other children that might wander by. My first experiment with kidlit is the new Cosmic Collisions series (MIT Kids Press). These books challenge you to hypothesize what will happen when two astronomical objects slam together. Read on, watch the collision unfold, and see if you guessed right!
