Is It a Bird? Is it a Plane? No! It’s Super-Miriam!
February 2012
Miriam just might be superwoman. Not only is she wrapping up her PhD in Chemistry at UC Berkeley, but she plays cello with a piano trio, is active in the LGBT community, and serves on the BASIS Steering Committee as well as the CRS Advisory Council on Elementary Science Education. Not to mention staying active every day and volunteering with BASIS in classrooms!
Miriam Bowring might be superwoman. Not only is she wrapping up her PhD in Chemistry at UC Berkeley, but she plays cello with a piano trio, is active in the LGBT community, and serves on the BASIS Steering Committee as well as the CRS Advisory Council on Elementary Science Education. Not to mention staying active every day and volunteering with BASIS in classrooms!
Miriam discovered her love for science early. When she was almost three, a brood of cicadas made a home in her neighborhood, she spent that summer observing them and collecting exoskeletons. This was not an uncommon activity; she reports spending a good amount of time in her childhood crouched near the ground examining bugs and had dreams of being an entomologist.
Her appreciation for exploration was not limited to the outdoors; one of her favorite activities as a child was making spider habitats in her third grade classroom. When she got petri dishes from her parents for help with a project assigned to her in that same third grade class, she used them to grow mold spores in her dark closet. To this day her parents love to show guests Miriam’s “mold closet” that still harbors a faint odor of experiments of days gone by.
Miriam completed her undergraduate research at Yale where she started off as a cognitive science major. She loved studying the brain and finding out how humans learn. However, along the way she cultivated a passion for chemistry. After her final chemistry course, she realized she wanted to continue learning more about it.
By the time she finished at Yale she had worked in three different chemistry research groups and knew that she wanted to be a professor. To pursue her interest in teaching before delving into her post-graduate career, Miriam became a high school chemistry teacher at Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School in Massachusetts.
Miriam had the freedom to design her own curriculum that was engaging and hands on, as well as one that could accommodate a wide range of learning styles. She encouraged students to be curious and they often designed their own experiments.
Currently Miriam is in her fifth year of graduate studies in the Chemistry Department at UC Berkeley. Focusing on organometallic catalysis she says what draws her to this work is her interest in the mechanisms and asking “how?” and “why?” questions.
In her first year as a BASIS volunteer, Miriam volunteered with the team of a fellow grad student, Andy Tsai. When he left UC Berkeley, she had the opportunity to create her own lesson. She chose to make a lesson on the chemistry of soap with a focus on inquiry.
Miriam was particularly impacted during one BASIS visit when a student designed her own clever control experiments without any prompting from the visiting scientists or her teacher. As the scientists were leaving the classroom after their one-hour lesson, the same student walked up to Miriam and asked for her autograph.
CRS feels so fortunate to have the support of such a compassionate and talented individual. Thank you, Miriam!