Relating Science to the Rest of the World
November 2013
Graduate student, Megan Vieira, has been volunteering with BASIS for over two years, building on her previous teaching experience as an Interpretive Park Ranger and substitute teacher.
Graduate student, Megan Vieira, has been volunteering with BASIS for over two years, building on her previous teaching experience as an Interpretive Park Ranger and substitute teacher. For her first BASIS presentation, Megan visited her daughter’s 1st grade class to teach a lesson called “Clouds Clouds Everywhere.” Although Megan said it was fun, the visit didn’t go as smoothly as she would have liked; the kids were just so excited to see her in their classroom.
Megan grew up in Eugene, Oregon. She always knew that she was going to be a scientist. In elementary school she was determined to be a paleontologist but later decided to become an astrophysicist after seeing a poster in her middle school math class about professions requiring the most math. Drawing on those early interests, she went on to study Math and Physics at a community college but later changed her focus to Math and Chemistry.
Megan graduated from the University of Oregon in 2006, one week before the birth of her daughter. When her daughter was in pre-school, Megan worked as a teaching assistant in her class. Two years later, after the birth of their son, Megan and family moved to the Oregon Coast where she worked as the Interpretive Ranger at South Beach State Park, as a substitute teacher, and aide in special education classrooms. Once her son was old enough for pre-school, Megan applied to graduate school and the entire family moved to California. She continues to volunteer once a month in her children’s classes, helping the teachers and demonstrating science concepts with fun experiments.
Now, as a graduate student in Professor Ron Cohen’s lab, Megan uses Physical Chemistry to study the atmosphere. More specifically, she looks at the exchange of trace gases in plants to better understand how forests affect the global balance of ground-level ozone concentrations. When Megan began volunteering with BASIS in 2011, there were several other graduate students in her lab who had been developing a lesson for 5th grade called “Water in Our Atmosphere: Make it Rain” which centers around how clouds form. Now, Megan and her lab mates, Ben Nault and Paul Romer, visit classrooms twice a month alternating between the two lessons. They store the materials in lab and share the responsibility of preparing for each BASIS presentation.
While she’s been involved in science outreach and education in other capacities, Megan says that BASIS is different since she gets to work with an entire classroom of students at one time. “I really like the look of wonder on the student’s faces when I create a cloud in a bottle and pass it around,” says Megan. “The first graders always have the best [questions] about clouds, everything from what clouds are made of, to what happens on the other side of clouds and what clouds think and talk about. I have to hide my laughter when the kids answer each other, and gently explain at the end of the lesson what is true, what is not true, and what things are still open questions. I love their curiosity, their cleverness, and how comfortable they are with uncertainty.”
Her experiences in the classroom have also helped Megan think about science in a more fundamental way. “Kids can understand science if you explain it to them using simple concepts that relate to their lives. Because I try to explain my science to my children, I feel that I have a better understanding of how my work relates to the rest of the world. It also allows me to have meaningful conversations about my work with non-scientific adults, so I have something to talk about with the parents of my children’s classmates.”
In her spare time, Megan is taking her two children to sports classes, dance classes, birthday parties and play dates. As a family, they ride their bikes everywhere including camping trips in the summer and they help to organize the monthly East Bay Bike Parties. After a long day of research, Megan likes to sew clothes and knit as her artistic outlet to unwind after a hard day of research.