Aomawa Shields is an astrobiologist who studies the potential for life on other planets. She also uses her training as an actor to teach middle school girls about the joys of astronomy. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

Aomawa Shields is a woman of “contradictions.” An astronomer and astrobiologist, she searches for exoplanets where life might exist by using computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere they’d need to support it. And she’s also a classically trained actor, who — through her organization Rising Stargirls — teaches astronomy to middle school girls of color using theater, writing and visual art to spark their imaginations.

She talks to the TED Blog about how the threads of her life — scientist, actor, role model and educator — weave together into a unique whole.

“Astrobiology” is a new word to me. What does it mean?

Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. It’s a huge topic. Astrobiologists come from all different primary fields — I have an astronomy background, but there are also geologists who become astrobiologists as well as oceanographers, chemists and biologists. We’re all working together to answer the question: “Are we alone in the universe?” And also: “How do we go about answering that question?”

Some of these experts focus on the origin of life: How did life even get started on our planet? Others think about metabolism: How does life evolve, use its energy and carry out the reactions that it needs to feed, grow, reproduce and respond to its environment? Are there different kinds of metabolisms besides what we know here on Earth that life could use? It’s important to ask that question, because we don’t want to miss out on discovering life because it uses different chemical processes from life as we know it, or because it is not carbon-based, or because it uses something besides water to carry out molecular processes.

An artist’s vision of Kepler-62f, a potentially habitable planet orbiting a star slightly cooler than our sun. It’s 1,200 light years away. Image: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech

We have all these planets that have been discovered, but we can’t look at all of them in detail to try to measure their atmospheric composition and determine if there’s life there. So I’m a big proponent of using a combination of observational astronomy and theoretical astronomy techniques to help us narrow in on the planets most likely to have water and life. Finding them is the first step, and it’s an important, crucial step — but it’s not the whole story. Identifying a planet as “potentially habitable” does not mean it’s “habitable,” and “habitable” does not mean “inhabited.” That’s something that the public can get really confused by.

Your approach is to do climate modeling on exoplanets. How does this work, and what does it tell us about the potential for life out there?

I modify climate models originally developed for the Earth — three-dimensional global climate models that are used to forecast weather and climate patterns — and apply them to planets orbiting different kinds of stars. The idea is to try to pin down whether these new planets we’re discovering might be habitable. For example, different types of stars emit light in different ranges of the spectrum. Cooler stars emit a lot more light at longer wavelengths, and ice and atmospheric gases strongly absorb that type of light. So planets orbiting those types of stars might tend to be warmer compared to planets orbiting other types of stars. That’s what some of my work suggests. By looking at the combination of factors that can influence the climate of a planet, we can try to determine the conditions necessary for that planet to be hospitable for life.

My work will help decide which planets to put at the top of the priority list to look at once the next generation of telescopes become available, as it’s those new missions that will allow us to go looking for the atmospheric fingerprints of life on a planet. This is important because we don’t have infinite telescope time, and we’ve got thousands of planets discovered so far — and quite a long list of those are actually in what we call the “Goldilocks zone,” where they might not be too warm or too cold to host life.

As a modeler, I can determine what the surface temperature would be if the atmosphere of a planet has a certain composition. My work mantra is: “The Goldilocks zone is not the be-all and end-all.” You can have a planet that is at the right distance from a star but that still isn’t habitable, because there are all sorts of other factors that could make it uninhabitable — the shape of its orbit, for instance, could create extreme temperature fluctuations over the course of its year as it goes around its star. We need to explore the wide range of factors that can affect the climate and habitability of a planet, so we have an accurate assessment of a planet’s prospects for life.

Aomawa Shields explains her research on the Kepler-62 system to undergraduate astronomy students at UCLA. Photo: NBC Learn

What kinds of planets would you prioritize?

If a planet is warm enough for water, no matter what, I throw it in my model universe. I would put it at the top of the list, because it would take a lot for it not to be habitable. Still, that doesn’t mean it actually has water. We’re trying to get large telescopes to hone in on the atmosphere and look for indicators of, perhaps, some sort of ocean. Colleagues of mine are studying ways to detect the glint of starlight reflected from an ocean on an exoplanet. The thing is: the glint might not even be water. Saturn’s moon Titan, for example, has lakes of liquid ethane, and we can detect the glint on those. So if there’s life there, it would be life like nothing we know of.

What else do you look for in a planet?

Astrobiologists also explore possible false positives for life. For example, you might assume that if you detect oxygen in an atmosphere, it means there’s life on the planet. Well, volcanoes can make oxygen — they expel carbon dioxide, which is carbon and oxygen, and that can get broken up by sunlight. So if you detected the oxygen you might think there’s life there when there’s not.

One task is to generate a list of false positives, so that we can check those off. It’s a tough question: How can we tell, unequivocally, that a planet has life on it, without physically going there? Because that’s probably not going to happen in our lifetimes. But getting a telescope up in space that could measure these atmospheric constituents? That could happen in our lifetime, so we want to know exactly what to look for.

My work is leading up to that. I’m helping to generate that list of prioritized planets so that we will be able to say, “Okay, these planets are most likely to succeed. Let’s point the telescopes there.” I think it’s a crucial step in this search.

You’re an actor as well as an astrobiologist. Those are two extremely time-consuming and al-absorbing disciplines. How did you pull that off?

I actually left astronomy for 11 years. I started off at MIT and studied earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, and got my bachelor’s degree. I started a PhD program in astrophysics right out of undergrad. I had also applied to a couple of acting grad schools, though nothing came of that. And yet acting was always a pull, so when things got challenging academically during that first year, I thought, “Let me try this acting and see what happens.”

I deferred from the astrophysics program and went to UCLA for theatre — and the whole world opened up. Acting felt like playtime, because they were having us do things like find a favorite poem and bring it in to share with the class — and then act it out. We got to write our own one-person show. It was hard in a very different way, and extremely terrifying.

Aomawa Shields starring in a Los Angeles production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, directed by Brad Mays. Photo: Courtesy of Aomawa Shields

But after receiving my acting degree, I realized I missed astronomy. I didn’t want to hear about discoveries on the TV news with everyone else — I wanted to be part of it. I took a day job at Caltech, as a helpdesk operator for the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is like Hubble, but looking at the universe through infrared eyes instead of visible eyes. Someone there knew I had an acting background, and when PBS came knocking — which they tend to do at Caltech when they need science hosts — I got an audition as co-host for a science news magazine, Wired Science, a partnership between PBS and Wired magazine. And I got the job.

Gradually, I fell back in love with the field. Science television really seemed to put both of my worlds — acting and astronomy — together. Suddenly it started to feel like all roads led back to getting my PhD in astrophysics. Through Caltech, I was put in contact with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he told me that I needed a PhD to be seen as an expert on TV. I also applied to the NASA Astronaut Candidate Program around that time, and a PhD was necessary to advance to the next level there too. So I took the leap and went back for my astrophysics PhD at the University of Washington. My husband’s willingness to move to Seattle, and his support throughout grad school, were instrumental to my success.

You’ve also synthesized acting and astronomy in your work with girls and STEM education. What was the inspiration for this work?

I wanted to encourage more girls from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the sciences to consider astronomy careers. But I didn’t want to teach them astronomy in a conventional, lecture-based way — or even do typical hands-on astronomy activities. I wanted to use my unique background.

My workshop, which is called “Universe: More than Meets the Eye,” aims straight for the fact that girls, when they’re in middle school, start to get quiet. They start to raise their hands less often, and become overly concerned with how they appear to others — how pretty they look, what’s on the outside — and less concerned with what they’re thinking and feeling. But there’s so much more to them than that, and whether they can learn facts about planets. I thought, “Let’s take a multifaceted approach to astronomy.” I was lucky to have funding from the National Science Foundation, which values this kind of outreach work just as highly as my research.

Rising Stargirls inspires middle school girls of color to explore astronomy through theater and visual art. Photo: Esther Lee

The workshop incorporates writing, theater games and visual art. We ask the girls to imagine. For example, we’ll ask them to draw their own exoplanet, and make choices about that planet. Is it too hot or too cold for life? If it does have life, what kind of life would it have? What do you want it to look like? How many stars does it orbit? When a girl says to me while she’s drawing, “What if we discover a planet that actually looks like what I’m drawing?” it’s wonderful to be able to say, “We could! We really could. We’re finding crazy planets out there.” That interaction means she’s thinking about her own relationship to the subject.

From there, I got the idea to take this work to different schools. I just finished doing a workshop at Irving STEAM Magnet Middle School in Los Angeles. The school is 80% Hispanic, and the girls that participated in the workshop were Hispanic. Over three weeks, we met twice a week after school for two hours. At the end, they said, “Why do you have to leave?” I asked them to rate their level of agreement with the statement: “I see myself as a science person” on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree) before and after the workshop. Before the workshop, only 20% of the girls answered with a 4 or higher. After the workshop, more than 60% selected a 4 or higher. Those are encouraging results.

If I can get girls to see a piece of themselves — their hair, a foot, their face and eyes, a finger — as connected to an exploding star, maybe that connection will stay with them as they start to encounter the inevitable challenges of a science career. So they won’t turn their backs on it when things get tough.

How Aomawa Shields explains the role of an atmosphere in determining a planet’s climate? She uses a thick coat as an analogy in the case of Venus. Photo: NBC Learn

You seem to be pulled strongly in many directions at once.

Yes, I am. But I’m also realizing that maybe I don’t have to think in such either/or terms. One of the greatest things to come out of my experience with TED is the understanding that we are all potentially walking contradictions. Another member of my TED cohort noted that the contradiction is only in how we might be perceived by others. In reality, that’s just how humans are. We have so many different facets.

I’m a champion of: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” I was 34 years old when I started grad school in astronomy the second time around. And I was so much better prepared for it as a result of my age — mentally, emotionally and spiritually. There’s a way to be involved in the thing that you always loved to do. And my tagline on my website is: “There’s no one way to be a scientist.” Really, there’s no one way to do anything. Just because there’s no one who’s gone before me that has done it doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. My only limitations are my own mind, really.

LEGOs are for building spaceships, crafting castles and getting lost in your couch. But what if they could be used not just to dream of lands long ago and times far away, but to inspire future scientists? That’s what writer Maia Weinstock had in mind when she made these STEM scientist action figures.

Weinstock has turned TED Fellows Jedidah Isler (an astrophysicist), Danielle N. Lee (a biologist) and David Sengeh (a bio-engineer), as well as TED speaker Mae Jemison (an astronaut) into miniature figurines using LEGOs. In the Scientific American article “It’s time for more diversity in STEM toys,” she explains why: increased racial diversity in STEM toys can help kids imagine (and then create) a world where Hispanic programmers and African-American chemists are the norm instead of notable exceptions.

STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — is a place where students in the United States are lagging behind. And minority students are left out disproportionately, says Weinstock, who cites these numbers: African-Americans make up about 12% of the US population, but only earn 7% of STEM bachelor degrees and 2% of STEM PhDs. Among the causes, Weinstock suggests, are disparities in access to AP courses and after-school programs that would prepare kids adequately for them.

And then there’s the toys.

Toys alone cannot solve the problem, of course, but they can create a framework of representation. And despite the fact that racial demographics are shifting rapidly in the US, most toys that depict people still default to a Caucasian/white skin tone. It may seem trivial, but it sends kids a clear message about their potential.

“It’s time to encourage underrepresented kids’ interest in STEM with more toys and media demonstrating that they belong in these fields,” writes Weinstock.

Minority representation in STEM toys can encourage minority students to have the same STEM aspirations as their white peers. And so Weinstock created these custom figurines to serve as an example to companies like LEGO, and as an encouragement for toy companies that are already increasing their minority representations in toys. Weinstock’s figures include scientists in their element, complete with tiny lab equipment.

All the TEDsters featured are active advocates of empowering minority students. As Danielle N. Lee put it, “As an ‘Other’ in science, I have witnessed how ‘traditional’ science education fails urban students.”

Jedidah Isler echoes, “I believe STEM can be used as social uplift.”

Do you work in the sciences, technology or engineering? Ever thought about becoming a STEM teacher? Below, proof that teachers blow minds. Illustration: Cultivated Wit

By Baratunde Thurston

So, you might know me. I ran the digital side of The Onion for a long time; I’m the author of How To Be Black. People call me to do things like host White House events on innovation, do the wrap-up at TED salons, join semi-secret cabals at MIT, and comment on the teevee. The underlying constant in my multi-hyphenate life is running my creative company, Cultivated Wit. I’m proud of what we do, but part of the deal with an agency-client relationship is: you keep it quiet.

But I’m working on a campaign right now that I’m so proud of, I’m speaking up loudly. Because this topic hits close to home.

Today, Cultivated Wit launches a co-funded digital campaign to inspire math, science, tech and engineering (or STEM) undergraduates and recent grads to teach. Through teaching, they can change how young people see themselves and affect the world around them, while helping the U.S. finally surpass the Slovak Republic in our mathematics ranking.

Simply put: Blow Minds. Teach STEM.

Leading the effort to answer President Obama’s 2011 call for 100,000 new STEM teachers by 2021 is the organization 100Kin10. This network of 200 organizations (corporations, universities, non-profits, school districts, federal agencies, museums, states and others) has combined forces to co-fund this campaign and bring Voltron-like collaborative power to this important mission.

True to our origins in humor (several other founders worked for The Onion, too) and design (our newest partners added an actual art degree to our wall), Cultivated Wit has built a campaign that’s fun, smart, and hopefully as awesome as the teachers who, every day, expand kids’ minds in classrooms, labs and computer rooms across the country.

This animated music video acts as the anthem of our message.

I rarely get as personally involved in our client work as with this project, but this topic hits close to home. I’m the product of an investment in STEM education myself.

Before my 12th birthday, I met several of the Tuskegee Airmen, thanks to one of my Bancroft Elementary School teachers who set up an “Air and Space Club” at our DC public school.

As a teenager, I got a computer to do my bidding — my bird beat up my friend’s bird — thanks to programming in C on the broadband-connected UNIX terminal at the Sidwell Friends upper school circa 1994.

Pre-dating all that, I came home to an internet-connected computer because my mind-blowingly awesome mother knew and lived the power of STEM to transform possibilities for our family. She had taught herself enough to trade in her employment as a domestic and clerical worker for a career as a COBOL programmer for the federal government, making her effectively a pre-founding member of Black Girls Code.

All this had a clear impact on the trajectory of my life. These are just some of the titles I’ve held: telecom analyst, political blogger, director of digital for The Onion, director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab, CEO/hashtagger-in-chief of Cultivated Wit, club bouncer (this last one required lots of counting!).

The TED community is one I don’t have to preach to much about the power of science, technology, engineering, math and education in general to change the world. I could point to Kevin Slavin’s talk about algorithms dominating our financial markets or Adam Spencer’s exuberance for hunting “monster prime numbers” or Richard Turere’s anti-lion defense system. And then there’s infectiously positive educator Rita Pearson and science advocate Christopher Emdin on “creating magic” in the classroom.

On top of that, you’ve got TED-Ed (a 100Kin10 partner, by the way) and the TED Prize for the School in the Cloud, both of which promote expanded access to education. And I’d like to think I contributed peripherally to the pro-mind-blowing TED camp with my recent TEDxKC talk about the value of integrating humor into our techno-fabulous future.

Many of these talks are possible because the speakers had teachers who took the time to transfer not just their knowledge but their attention, empathy and belief in us.

So, how can you get involved? Start with spreading the word. Do you know people who work in the sciences, technology or engineering fields? Do you know people who use math? Are you connected to teachers or students or student-teachers? Do you know people who sometimes think about tomorrow? Then they are invested in the future.

Please share this campaign with them because, generally speaking, minds don’t blow themselves. Much of our future (and the amazing TED talks they will produce) depends on getting more excellent STEM teachers in the classroom today.

Check out BlowMinds.org.

Baratunde Thurston is the co-founder and CEO of Cultivated Wit which combines the powers of technology, design and humor to tell important stories and build creative community. He authored The New York Times best-seller How To Be Black, and has spoken at TED@SXSW, TEDxMidwest, TEDxKC and TED@NYC. He uses math almost every day of his life.

At TED2012, Ramirez talked about a crisis in education: The problems of our time require creativity and nonlinear thinking, and in the United States, students simply aren’t being prepared to come up with the solutions we’ll need. Now, in her new TED Book Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, Ramirez shares what she sees as the best way to inspire new learners — a commitment to improving science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. In the book, Ramirez takes a hard look at the cultural and historical reasons why STEM education has declined in the United States over the last few decades. Her plea: We need to bring it back.

Curious to hear more about what can be done to make STEM fun again, we asked Ramirez a few questions about her new TED Book.

What inspired you to write this book now?

There is a line in the poem On Crime and Punishment by Khalil Gibran that says, “He falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.”

As a scientist who has walked along this bumpy STEM pipeline, I wanted to leave clues and a map on how to navigate it. Save Our Science is the map. It’s not only for those within the pipeline, but also for the whole STEM ecosystem. Everyone feels helpless in this education crisis. Save Our Science is a manifesto to recharge and empower everyone. In it, I am acting as an on-the-ground Secretary of Education, attempting to help all Americans feel empowered to make change. This book spells out how we — teachers, parents, citizens, politicians — can use all the pieces that are working and arrange them in a way that will make the US a leader in STEM education again. It includes actions that individuals and groups can take to get the education system back on track.

Why is STEM education so vital?

First, most of the jobs of the 21st century will require people to be comfortable with science and math — not only the content and information, but the mindset that comes from these fields, such as trial-and-error and the skill of asking good questions.

Second, all the focus on testing is not allowing children to be children. That is, there are few opportunities for kids to explore something inspired by their curiosity, and few chances to get their hands dirty. Some might say that American childhood is under attack and with it all the key human development steps needed to make whole and healthy adults. STEM is like a training camp for key skills like encouraging curiosity and patience, and making friends with failure.

It has been shown that the ability to self-regulate — in other words, patience — is a better marker for success than IQ. There’s the famous marshmallow experiment, where children are given a marshmallow that they can eat now, or they’d get two if they wait 15 minutes. It was found that those who waited (less than 30% of them) actually did better in school. In this microwave era, STEM teaches children patience; you can’t rush an experiment. For example, try to quickly make rock candy from sugary water. You can’t! It takes time and requires patience. But it is so worth it! Learning to wait is a muscle that is lacking but important for human development. STEM provides human skills and virtues that will make our children successful down the road.

What key changes can we all make to improve STEM education?

Save Our Science suggests action items everyone can do to make STEM more fun and engaging. It could be a shop owner installing a 3D printer; or a mechanic having bike-repair nights in the neighborhood; or restaurants showing the chemistry of cooking. Parents can take stuff apart with their kids and learn together how things work. Show science videos at malls, in movie previews and at the dentist’s office. Of course, policymakers could learn more about what really works from other countries. The bottom line is, if we lather engaging STEM opportunities everywhere, we are going to change the cultural thinking about science.

I’ve seen it in my own town. I was having carpets cleaned in my home for Thanksgiving. The cleaning guy immediately recognized me from my science videos that play on the local cable channel in town. Our conversation moved from chitchat about the weather to an intense discussion of science. He talked about what he learned on the video, and then we started actually coming up with ideas for another video. He emphatically made suggestions. But that is not the point; the point is that he got it. He got that science was for him, and he could demand more, inspired by his curiosity. Science was part of his language now, and we were having a real conversation about real issues. Making science accessible and engaging is the first step to individual ownership of the concepts, and is the first step to making real change in STEM education.

How do you personally make STEM education more fun?

I am a STEM evangelist and try to make it fun in a number of ways. If I am at a cocktail party, I’m that person who will pull out a party trick. In my case, it is a small piece of memory wire that I store my wallet. This material changes its shape when you heat it with a match. If you want to see adults show childlike enthusiasm, this wire does it every time. After I show the wire demo, then I wait. Some people will be hooked and will ask what is going on. I’ll make analogies between atoms to members of a marching band, where each individual makes a small change, but the whole is a pronounced change. You can see this wire in action in this small TED-Ed video here.

As for younger people, at Yale I created a science lecture series for kids called Science Saturdays. Here, children get to learn about science from experts in an age-appropriate but not-dumbed-down way.

For a broader reach, I created a series of short science videos call Material Marvels, which have been seen all over the globe. I try to make science appealing with outlandish demonstrations (that often need a blowtorch), or make silly analogies — like that solar cells are sandwiches of silicon. These videos are playing on local television in my town, and I am surprised by their impact. When I go to the barbershop, gas station, or even at church, occasionally someone will come up to me to say they watched these videos. One woman recently said to me, “Hey, I saw you on TV doing science. I loved it, not because I know you, but because you made it fun. And I am an English major!” That is a huge testimonial to the impact of making science enjoyable and putting it where folks have access to it. People will come if you build it, and bring science to them in a way that is palatable.

In my classroom, I do some of the same outlandish demonstrations, but I also add lots of group discovery. Students learn better from their peers, so I’ll start a lesson and have an in-class assignment that they will do together. This is a less threatening approach for learning and, I’ve been told by my students, is fun.

Also, I’m an author. Right now I’m writing a book about American football through a science lens, called Newton’s Football, for Random House. With my collaborator, Allen St. John, we are using football as a model to describe the hot topics in science like chaos theory, the physics of football helmets, concussions, and other nuggets in a fun, big-think, non-preachy way. I think football fans will like a new way to look at the game, and non-football fans will gain a new point of entry to the game.

All in all, my joy is learning new things and translating what I’ve learned so that other people understand it too. In essence, I am acting as a science conduit and translate science so that it seems relevant to everyone. That is my mission, anyway.

Save Our Science is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

In Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, Yale professor Ainissa Ramirez makes an impassioned call for a recommitment to improve science, technology, engineering and math education — often referred to as STEM — in our schools and throughout our society. She describes what habits we need to change to make STEM fun again, as well as a plan for how to increase every child’s participation in these disciplines.

Ramirez notes: “The artist Pablo Picasso once said that all children are born artists and that the trick is to stay that way as an adult. I believe that all children have an inner scientist within them, and we need to get them in touch with their inner scientist again.”

Save Our Science is available for the Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

Ramirez is no stranger to TED. At TED2012, she gave a powerful plea for us to rethink STEM education. Pointing out that we are quickly running out of rare earth minerals, essential for almost all of our technology, Ramirez believes that it will take major ingenuity to create a way to recycle these precious materials. Are we as a society prepared? Could this be a Sputnik moment for education? Read all about her talk » 

Ramirez was also the educator behind the TED-Ed lesson “Magical metals, how shape memory alloys work,” which used slices of bologna to bring walking, talking atoms to life. Watch the fascinating lesson below.