Ainissa Ramirez
Science History Institute
Join materials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez, who will discuss how simple materials and the inventions they enabled helped shape society. She’ll use her latest book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, to show how everyday inventions influenced language, politics, and even our bodies.
This Lunchtime Lecture will be livestreamed on YouTube.
About the Speaker
Ainissa Ramirez is a materials scientist, a sought-after public speaker and science communicator, and the author of the award-winning book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (The MIT Press, 2020). A Brown and Stanford graduate, she has worked as a research scientist at Bell Labs and held academic positions at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She has written for Forbes, Time, Science, The Atlantic, Nature, and Scientific American, and has explained science headlines on CBS, CNN, NPR, PBS, and the History Channel. Ramirez speaks internationally on the topics of science and technology and gave a TED talk on the importance of STEM education. She is currently writing books about science for children.
About the Series
Our virtual Lunchtime Lecture Series takes a rigorous and entertaining approach to exploring topics for scholars and anyone interested in stories about the history of science, technology, and medicine. The talks help expand perceptions of the nature of science and how it’s done.