Why history cares about eels with John Wyatt February 19, 2025, 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific RSVP here! John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. He is best known, however, for his public-facing work on eels in pre-modern English history. He is "The Surprised Eel Historian" on social media, where he works to raise awareness of the role of eels as an endangered species. His work on eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker.
John Wyatt holds a MPA in Nonprofit Management from Park University, an MA in History from East Tennessee State University, and a PhD in Medieval Studies from Cornell University. When not tweeting about eels, he draws custom maps on commission.
Volcanoes with Samuel J. Mitchell March 13, 2025, 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific RSVP here! Dr. Samuel Mitchell is a volcanologist, geologist, and Antarctic expedition guide based in the UK. His research has taken him from the edge of active lava lakes, to advising natural history documentaries, to submarine diving on the deep Galápagos seafloor. He studies how and why volcanoes erupt by conducting science on rock samples produced during eruptions. When not studying volcanoes, he spends his time on boats down in Antarctica as an expedition guide and naturalist. His primary goal is to make earth and ocean science an engaging, exciting, and accessible subject for those from all backgrounds.
Space with Camilo Jaramillo-Correa April 11, 2025, 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific RSVP here! Dr. Camilo Jaramillo-Correa is a researcher who enjoys working in a laboratory, where he studies how materials interact with plasmas (the fourth state of matter). Camilo was born in Colombia, where he completed his bachelor’s in engineering physics in 2015. A year later, he moved to the United States to attend graduate school. He obtained a Master’s in Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, and his doctorate in Nuclear Engineering from Penn State in 2023. During this time, he was part of a NASA SSERVI research center called TREX (Toolbox for Research and Exploration), where he worked with planetary scientists to study how particles from the solar wind erode and alter the surface of asteroids in our Solar System (a process called space weathering). He did this by exposing minerals to particle beams in a laboratory.Camilo is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, and as a collaborator at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), where he is studying the interactions of different materials with plasmas, to assess the performance of candidate materials to be used in the walls of fusion reactors.
How Shrimp Swim with Sara Santos May 13 2025, 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific? RSVP here! Sara is a scientist who studies how water moves when animals swim through. She focuses on shrimp to understand how they swim and uses that knowledge to design underwater robots. These robots will one day explore oceans on Earth. They could even explore oceans in the solar system, like the ones in Europa and Enceladus. Sara did experiments with both live and robot shrimp to figure out how shrimp swim. She discovered that shrimp use unique swirling patterns in the water, called vortices, to help them move forward. This resembles how small flying insects like bees stay in the air. Her work helps answer questions about how animals move in water and connects ideas from nature to new technology.
