Museums
I love minerals and I also love the places that display them for public education and enjoyment. Below is information about museum projects I have worked with for public outreach. I plan to continue these types of work in the future to help spread geoscience knowledge and help young people get interested in entering the discipline.
Colgate University
As an undergraduate at Colgate University, I worked as a student curator for the university’s Ten Eyck-Burr Mineral Collection. This work included re-organizing, labeling, and cataloguing material and training other students to do this work. I started this work after taking Colgate’s excellent Mineralogy course, which got my excited about mineralogy as a science and a way to understand the Earth.
Yale University/Yale Peabody Museum
As a graduate student at Yale University, I volunteered in the Mineralogy and Meteoritics collections division of the Yale Peabody Museum. This work was guided by collections manager Dr. Stefan Nicolescu and included organizing, labeling, and cataloguing material in the collections, including newly-received material.
Work in Mineral Collections
Outreach Work With the Yale Peabody Museum
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David Friend Hall
The Yale Peabody Museum opened the David Friend Hall in 2016. The exhibit is designed “to be a contemplative space where visitors can ponder the beauty of a quartz or fluorite specimen as they would a canvas by Monet or Van Gogh.”
As a graduate student at Yale, I worked with museum staff and Yale undergraduate Leo Shimonaka (YC ‘18) to build a smartphone app that guides visitors through the hall. I wrote the scientific content, intended to simulate visitors to think about geological processes and continue to ask questions after leaving the museum.
Scientific information in the app includes uses of minerals in everyday life, how crystals grow, history of scientific thought on mineralogy, changes to climate through time as revealed by fossils, and the roles of fluids in mineral growth.
The app is free to download (Yale Peabody Museum David Friend Hall) and the museum is free to the public when it reopens in 2024 following a renovation.
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Tours
As part of volunteer work with the Yale Peabody, I gave tours to the public and Yale classes of both the museum’s exhibit halls and the collections space. This was a wonderful opportunity to share information about a variety of geoscience topics, including crystal growth, color in minerals, geochemistry, hydrogeology, mineral resources, and historical scientific instruments.
Rice University Museum of the Earth (under development)
Alongside Rice University staff and PhD, Masters, and undergraduate students, I am working as part of a team to design and open the Rice University Museum of the Earth, a space on campus that will serve as a teaching resource for Rice classes and the general public. The team is led by Linda Welzenbach-Fries, who has extensive experience in planetary materials curation, science communication and educational outreach. The displays will use rock and mineral specimens as well as other ways to visualize Earth and its processes to explore important topics in natural resources, uses of minerals in society, and society’s energy needs.