Jennifer Frazier, Ph.D., is a cell biologist-turned-curator at the Exploratorium, a public learning laboratory and museum in San Francisco. Her projects include co-curating the museum’s Living Systems Gallery and Living Liquid, a project to visualize large ocean datasets for the public.
Through a Moore Foundation grant, Jennifer and her team are developing a series of exhibits that help visitors explore worlds they normally can’t see, from the secret lives of marine microbes to the movement of their immune cells. In this installment of Beyond the Lab, Jennifer describes the research and development involved in these cutting-edge exhibits.
What inspired you to become a scientist/researcher?
When I look back at my childhood, I realize how much my parents inspired me. The house I grew up in had tens of thousands of fossils, jars of sand from around the world, microscopes and bookshelves full of John McPhee books and Roadside Geology. My parents love science and were always curious about the world around them.
But I think what actually made me a scientist was that my parents were always modelling the qualities that make a good scientist, like noticing and asking questions. If we were on a hike, it wasn't just ‘Oh, we're going to go five miles and then we'll be at Glacier Lake.’ It was, ‘Whoa. We just went up 1,000 feet and did you see that the type of type of pine trees changed? Let's see what other plants are changing.’ They were always making observations and asking questions.
What topics/areas in science communication are you most interested in addressing?
The Exploratorium’s founder Frank Oppenheimer wanted to create a place where people could do more of what are considered the "verbs of science." He didn't put it this way, but that's my way of describing it. He wanted a place where people could make their own observations, or test their ideas. At the time, science museums contained mainly dioramas, planetariums, or other experiences that you couldn’t touch. He was one of the first people to get the public doing science outside the classroom, actively using lenses to explore light or doing real physics demonstrations.
The challenge in museums today is engaging people with things that they can't see or touch. We've worked for decades on things people can see, like lenses and bubbles and sand and fish. But most new science is beyond the realm of what we can see: areas like genomics and climate change. Scientists are collecting data with gliders in the ocean or sequencing machines, which they use to make incredible discoveries about the world within and around us. The challenge is helping our visitors connect with these worlds. How do we get them to deeply explore and engage with things that are beyond the realm of their perception?
I’m interested in exploring how we can create meaningful experiences for the public with these large datasets through visualizations. How do we create visualizations that are public can interact with? What design factors would get them to engage with the data? How do we help them know that it's real and not a cartoon that we made up? We don't always succeed. It's challenging work, which you can think of as museum R&D [research and development]: some things succeed, some things fail – you generate knowledge for yourself and others in your field. One thing that excites me about our R&D work in visualization is that our findings are not just useful to museums, but all of the other fields interested in creating better computer-based discovery tools – computer science, cognitive science, design. It’s gratifying to do work that doesn’t just benefit our visitors, but impacts the work of others.
How do your colleagues, mentors and students help you achieve your goals?
Everything I do depends on my colleagues. My work involves a team both inside and outside the Exploratorium. None of it would be possible without close collaboration with scientists. We want to create authentic experiences where our visitors get to interact with real data, tools, and specimens. We can’t just read a Nature paper – we need scientists to show us their labs, share their big questions, give us datasets and samples. We've also worked closely with the UC Davis Center for Visualization to create our visualizations. Their expertise is essential to making many of our projects happen.
Inside the Exploratorium, there is a whole team that makes our exhibits happen. Sometimes people see our exhibits and think that they were just made by one person in our machine shop with a saw and a typewriter, but it really does take a team. On my team, there is a writer who's been writing labels for museums for over a decade and a graphic designer who specializes in graphics that work in museums. We have exhibit builders who know how to make things easy to maintain, and know how to make experiences accessible to all our visitors. To actually make all of the things that someone experiences at the Exploratorium takes an incredible network of inspiring scientists and creative partners.
What gets you going every day (besides coffee) and how do you stay motivated
Curiosity! There are so many things to learn every day. It blows my mind how we work, how our world works, how all these systems are interconnected. I find it so inspiring and interesting. I feel really fortunate that I have a job where I'm exposed to so many new ideas, and then get to think about how to share them with other people.
A recent example is an exhibit we just made with [Moore Foundation grantees] David Karl’s and Edward DeLong’s groups at University of Hawaii. We adapted their metatranscriptomics [gene expression] data into a visualization for the public to explore. Their labs sampled ocean water to understand what the microbes in the ocean are doing throughout the day. And one of the takeaways is that a lot of these marine microbes have a daily routine like we do – they prepare to make energy from the sun before it rises, they divide at the end of the day. Now when I look at the sun rising on the ocean, I can imagine all these billions of microbes turning on genes to make energy from the sun. To me, that's just amazing.
What are your greatest limitations/challenges in your role?
There are so many incredible stories to tell with all the new scientific data that is being collected. And I think the biggest challenge—the Exploratorium’s original challenge in a way—is how to give people an opportunity to engage and interact with phenomena. How do we help them see that it's real? How do we help them connect with it in a visceral way? These unseen worlds are just as real as what we can see, and have a dramatic impact on our lives. Helping people connect with that is the challenge.
Watch Jennifer talk about how phytoplankton influence the Earth’s oxygen and follow her (@frazierarchive) on Twitter.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.