Download PDF Fall Bridge on the Materials Genome Initiative September 29, 2025 Volume 55 Issue 3 The Fall 2025 issue explores the Materials Genome Initiative’s progress and future outlook, showcasing advances in autonomous experimentation, sustainable polymers, next-generation batteries, and the broader role of AI in engineering. An Interview with . . . Ainissa Ramirez, materials scientist, writer, and science communicator Monday, September 29, 2025 Author: Ainissa Ramirez RONALD LATANISION: I’d like to welcome everyone back to the National Academies’ Bridge interview series. Today we’re joined by Ainissa Ramirez, a writer and science communicator with a background in materials science and engineering. Also here is Kyle Gipson, editor of The Bridge. Ainissa, it’s great to see you. I know you hold a PhD in materials science, and it’s always a pleasure to speak with someone who bridges the worlds of science and storytelling. To get us started, could you tell us a little about your background like where you grew up, where you went to school, just to give our readers some context? AINISSA RAMIREZ: Sure. First of all, I’m delighted to be here. I’m really looking forward to talking about our beloved field of materials science. I was born in New York City but grew up in New Jersey, where I attended Catholic schools. I always loved science, but it wasn’t exactly a popular subject in those environments. Fortunately, I had some fantastic teachers who encouraged me early on. And that is what motivated me to eventually apply to schools that were outside of New Jersey, which was a little unusual back in the day. I did my undergrad at Brown, and that was probably the best decision I ever made. The liberal arts environment allowed me to study engineering while exploring broader interests, and I think that experience shaped who I am today. I’m an engineer, but also now a writer, and I believe that foundation was forged there. After Brown, I earned my PhD in materials science from Stanford, then went on to work at Bell Laboratories for several years. Following that, I spent about a decade as a professor at Yale. Eventually, I made what I like to call the leap into science evangelism, spreading the good word that science is for everyone. These days, I do that primarily through books, but also through speaking, podcasts, and other media. DR. LATANISION: What was the focus of your doctoral work? DR. RAMIREZ: I worked on amorphous carbon, specifically as it relates to data storage. If you think about a hard disk, there’s a thin protective layer on its surface, that’s amorphous carbon. When a hard disk winds down, a small stylus-like object actually lands on that surface. So when someone says “my hard disk crashed,” it’s because that stylus made an unwanted contact. My research focused on that top protective layer, how to strengthen it and make those crashes less damaging. DR. LATANISION: Did you go directly to Bell Labs from Stanford? DR. RAMIREZ: Yes, I was very lucky. Bell Labs hadn’t been hiring for some time, but when I was finishing up at Stanford, they had some openings. They came to campus to interview, and I thought, “Well, I’ll give it a try.” Honestly, I wanted to stay in California. Once you experience life there, you never want to leave. Returning to New Jersey wasn’t in my plans—I’d even promised myself I wouldn’t go back. But then Bell Labs offered me a position and you don’t say “no” to Bell Laboratories. So, I went back and it turned out to be a fantastic experience. I had a great time there. DR. LATANISION: Your recent writing is related to Jim West’s history. Did you work with him or meet Jim when you were at Bell Labs? DR. RAMIREZ: I did get to meet Jim West. Jim West is an African American inventor who created the microphone that is one of the most used microphones in the world. He was in a different department—I was in the materials department, and he was more in the acoustics part of Bell Laboratories. We did not really interface directly, but I knew of him. So I emailed him and asked if we could do lunch. I don’t remember what we talked about, because I think I was just enamored the whole time—he is such a star. I made what I like to call the leap into science evangelism, spreading the good word that science is for everyone. DR. LATANISION: You went from Bell Labs to Yale and you taught materials science for a few years. What led you to transition from being an academic in science and engineering to writing? DR. RAMIREZ: I think it was a gradual process. When I was a graduate student at Stanford, the women in the materials science program would organize an event for middle school girls called Expand Your Horizons. We put together demonstrations to explain materials science concepts using everyday objects like rubber bands and paper clips. I remember thinking, “This is fascinating.” I believe that that experience planted a seed in me. Later, when I joined Bell Laboratories, they had a program too—I believe it was called World of Science. It was a free lecture series where anyone who could get to their auditorium could hear talks by Bell Lab scientists. I thought, “Wow, what a great concept.” At Yale, we were all expected to contribute to broader impacts, so I created a lecture series called Science Saturdays. It took place each October and April, four Saturdays in a row. The format was based on what I call the three Ds: donuts, dynamic talks, and demonstrations. And we drew in kids and families for any one of those reasons. DR. LATANISION: The donuts… DR. RAMIREZ: The donuts would bring you in. You didn’t have to worry about breakfast. There were demonstrations, and they were often given by undergraduates because we targeted middle schoolers and we wanted people who were closer in age to our audience. There were also dynamic talks that were given by professors—fantastic, high-caliber people. I noticed that in October and April, my energy was off the charts. I was so excited to go to work. And then afterward, my energy would go down. So I enjoyed my work, but my energy was highest during the Science Saturdays months. Now, after 7 years of doing this, I said, “What kind of scientist are you? You’re getting data!” I observed that what I really loved was being a shepherd, bringing science to the general public. After my time at Yale was done, I could have made the change to go to another academic position. But I decided instead to take a leap and see what this science evangelism thing is. I was fortunate because right away, I got a book deal to write about football. It just kind of took off from there. DR. LATANISION: You wrote about football? DR. RAMIREZ: Yes. It talked about how the questions on the gridiron are some of the same questions that we’re answering in the laboratory—so things like chaos theory, the butterfly effect, game theory. It wasn’t about mechanics. It wasn’t the physics of collisions. There are books about that already. But it was more about exploring how people make decisions about plays. That’s very scientific as well. MR. GIPSON: You talked about transitioning into shepherding scientific topics and materials to a broad audience. I’d like to hear you talk a little more about why you think that’s so important, or where you think that energy comes from for you. Has there been a guiding or overarching mission underlying how you’ve approached communicating science to a broad audience, including younger audiences? Where do you think this energy comes from? DR. RAMIREZ: That is such a good question, and I want to thank you for asking that. I was one of those kids who used to ask a lot of questions and take things apart. Back in Jersey City in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I didn’t see any scientists but there was a program on PBS called 3-2-1 Contact and they had a repeating segment about kids solving problems. It featured this group called the Bloodhound Gang. One of the characters was an African American girl. I saw her asking questions and I asked my mom, “What is she doing?” My mom responded, “she’s doing science.” I was like, “That’s what I’m doing!” That put me on the road to becoming a scientist. Out of all the classes I took in grammar school, science was the one that spoke to me the best. It spoke to me the most. My science teachers were so nerdy and they made it okay for me to be nerdy too. I think that exposure—of seeing my reflection—is what put me on the path to wanting to create other reflections for kids. So, Jim West is an African American scientist who is now in his 90s. He created a technology that is one of the most used in the world. He invented it in the 1960s and it became popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And here we are in the 21st century. This is when I asked: “Where is Jim West’s book?” That’s what motivated me. I said, “Somebody ought to write this.” And then I realized—I think that person is me. DR. LATANISION: That’s an interesting point. I have grandchildren who spend most of their time, it seems to me, with their phones in their hands, playing games or communicating with their friends. How do you interact with young people on that level? Do you think that we are somehow abusing young people by making our technology too available to them? DR. RAMIREZ: I am definitely of the generation before all this technology existed and I certainly do miss my analog brain. I’m easily distractable now because of technology. All I can say is that children will evolve. They will do creativity differently because technology will assist them in new ways. Do I personally like it? Not really. But there’s nothing I can really do. What I can ask is that children sometimes do things without technology and see how that goes. This happens in conversations. I could be talking with someone and then they cannot recall a person’s name. They’ll want to look it up but I’ll tell them “no” because once you look it up, you’ll go down that rabbit hole and that will be the end of this conversation. My thinking is to keep this conversation going because it’s not important that you do not know it. I try and make occasions where we can separate from that technology and have more human interactions. DR. LATANISION: Frankly, I worry a little bit about it. I remember when I was a kid before we had all the electronics that are available today. We used to go out in the streets and do things. I really wonder whether technology is a little bit too advanced or maybe this is a parental issue. Maybe parents need to be more involved in making sure that kids don’t overextend their time on their laptop or their cell phone. DR. RAMIREZ: You raise good points. The other impetus for Spark, the book about Jim West, is my nephew. My nephew is a tinkerer. I wanted him to see another tinkerer so he’d know that who he is is okay. And I wanted this book to be for those who are STEM-minded so they could see that it was okay to be the way you are because here’s a guy who was just like that and he went on to create something fantastic. DR. LATANISION: Could you tell us a little bit more about Spark and your interaction with Jim? DR. RAMIREZ: Jim created this microphone called the foil electret microphone. People often know it as a condenser microphone. He did this when he was an intern at Bell Laboratories. Before that, Jim was a very rambunctious little boy. He used to take a lot of things apart. We would say he was naughty, but he was just curious. Jim really wanted to know how things worked. He wanted to go to college to learn more about science, but his parents actually tried to talk him out of it because this was happening in the 1950s and ‘60s. There weren’t many Black scientists. His father told him that’s a waste of money—that it is not going to happen. But Jim wasn’t just precocious; he was driven. He said “I will figure out how to go to college.” He repaired televisions and he stayed with some relatives to keep the costs down. He went to Temple University and that’s where he studied physics. Now, he needed to raise some money so over the summer, he saw that Bell Laboratories were looking for interns. At Bell Labs, he landed on an interesting project. There were some psychologists who were doing studies on sound and they wanted him to make special headphones for their tests on detecting a short pulse of sound. He didn’t know anything about that but he went to the library and learned that there was a strange material that could be used to make these headphones. He learned that if you put Mylar on a disk with another piece of metal above it, you can kind of create a capacitor. And if you can change the polarity—positive and negative—of this piece of metal, then the Mylar will move in and out and that will create a sound. He was like, “Okay, great. This is wonderful. I’m going to use this to make my headphones.” DR. LATANISION: He is an intern. DR. RAMIREZ: He is an intern. He is a fantastic intern. We should bring in interns because interns can do fantastic things. So he needs a battery to create the positive and negative charge for the Mylar to flex. It needs to have its own circuit. One day he’s in the laboratory and he has disconnected the circuit but he finds that he’s still able to hear a beep. It ends up that this material can store a charge and store it for decades. He doesn’t need that battery and he’s now able to make those headphones. That’s also when he has a great insight. If this material can make headphones, perhaps it can make a microphone because microphones and headphones work the opposite way. And when he tries that, the microphone works! Now, what makes this so powerful is that he discovered a material that doesn’t require a power supply to sustain a charge, which means the device can be consolidated. It can be used as an earpiece for people who are hard of hearing and in many other ways. The thing that is crazy is that electret, that material, that can store charge. DR. LATANISION: Did you talk to Jim when you were writing the book? DR. RAMIREZ: Oh yes. I talked to Jim a couple of times because I needed to understand what he did. I had never heard about this material that stores a charge but it has been known for a long time. If you look at books from the 1600s, they talk about a strange wax that was able to store charge. It was more of a curiosity then and no one knew what to do with it. However, Jim stumbled on it serendipitously with Gerhard Sessler, his collaborator. DR. LATANISION: It’s a great story. To start with a parent who was not very enthusiastic about education and then to achieve what he has achieved is really pretty amazing. MR. GIPSON: That is fascinating. I have another question about Spark, your first children’s picture book. Can you talk a little bit about the difference in the process of writing this, or how you have approached this for younger audiences compared to your earlier books that might be for older audiences? Was it more challenging in some ways or less challenging in some ways? DR. RAMIREZ: I think that I have evolved to the point where I could write a science children’s book. It’s challenging because you are trying to explain things to the youngest citizens in our country. In order to explain how that microphone works, which is a little on the complicated side, I had to introduce underlying concepts like electricity first. When Jim West was young, he had a book about electricity and in it he learned that Ben Franklin had done this experiment where he flew a kite in a storm and learned that lightning was electricity. I talk about that in the book. Later on, Jim West finds a radio and so I describe how a radio works. There is a speaker that moves in and out. I’m able to get concepts of sound established earlier in the book and build up to more complicated things. I found it very challenging but I found it challenging in a rewarding sense. I have to figure out how to explain this so that people are going to get it. It’s formidable, but it shapes me and makes me a better writer, too. DR. LATANISION: Do you meet with students and groups of students to talk about your interest in science and your history and so on? DR. RAMIREZ: I have been doing that for years. For a while, I was on a speaker’s track where I would go to different schools and libraries and talk about my path in science. More recently, I have been beta testing how to explain what Jim West did. I did some activities at some libraries. With children, we would make megaphones. We would get pieces of paper and roll them up. And I would say, “What can we do with this?” It can make the sound louder. And then I could say, “We can put it to our ear and we can hear sounds.” Next, I am having them learn about different types of sounds. Then we learn about vibrations. I will put their hands on a table and then I will smack the table a couple of times and they will feel the vibration. That’s when I explain that that’s what is going on in your ear. And then I will make the jump: “How do I make an electronic ear?” That is a microphone. You have them make the megaphone so that they feel connected to the concept of sound, and then you just march slowly to the main concept that I want to get to: the microphone. DR. LATANISION: That is very cool. You previously mentioned a book focused on football. What was that? DR. RAMIREZ: That was called Newton’s Football. That came out in 2013. DR. LATANISION: I have a technical question for you. Do you remember Deflategate? DR. RAMIREZ: I was very much involved in Deflategate. For me, this great story came out and I was waiting for Bill Nye and Neil Tyson to show up. They’re going to figure this out and they are going to explain it. But then nobody showed up. NPR reached out to me and I ended up being on with them and Fox Business News, explaining Deflategate and ideal gas law. At the time, people wanted to know if someone did it on purpose or is it possible for it to happen on its own because of the cold temperatures. I focused on the cold temperature concept. DR. LATANISION: The reason I ask is there is a lot of science in all of that. It could be PV = nRT. That would be a good illustration to kids that science has a meaning to something that is important to them. DR. RAMIREZ: Absolutely. I agree. That is why I thought, “This is a missed opportunity. Where is everyone?” And I think textbooks could be rewritten. They could just start off with Deflategate and explain what happened. People will be like, “What? Football?” And then the events are explained, and then you go into PV = nRT. DR. LATANISION: There you go. Tell me about the podcast. What do you do on your podcast? DR. RAMIREZ: The podcast—it’s not sunsetted, but I haven’t done it for a while. It was called Science Underground and it was a two-minute science explainer. I would explain things like the football spin and why snowflakes are white. It was designed to help teachers when they start a lesson. Teachers would ring a bell and say “let’s start off with this 2-minute podcast and learn a little bit about science.” This could be an introduction to a certain topic. That is what I did with Science Underground. From that, I went on to a program on PBS called SciTech Now. I would talk about different topics. Some of them were provocative like “Space Suit Secrets.” In that episode, we talked about how astronauts wear a diaper but there are multiple layers to their suits, too. I think that I have evolved to the point where I could write a science children’s book. It’s challenging because you are trying to explain things to the youngest citizens in our country. DR. LATANISION: One of the concerns I have personally is that I have a sense that the public is beginning to maybe lose a bit of trust in technology. I say that it is largely associated with artificial intelligence. I’m wondering if you get questions from kids about AI. For example, it is not just that you can train a computer, a machine, to give back human-like text. We’re talking about artificial general intelligence so that computers and bots and agents can think and even more extensively, artificial super intelligence, which would lead to the vision of something like humanoid robots walking the streets, for example. Do kids question you about this and ask if it makes sense that we are heading in this direction? What kinds of concerns do they have, if you have any interaction of that kind? DR. RAMIREZ: When I talk to kids, they ask me if I am concerned about AI. The question they ask is: “Should I be concerned about it?” I will say, “Yes, you should be concerned about it.” I also will tell them this is the reason why I wrote The Alchemy of Us. The Alchemy of Us looks at older technologies: the telegraph, the light bulb, the computer, and the clock. And it shows that these technologies have shaped us. These technologies are easy to wrap our brains around. The telegraph, for example, is just turning electricity on and off. And clocks—we kind of know how they work. We may not be able to take one apart, but we know how they work. I treat The Alchemy of Us as a gym where you are working on smaller weights. If audiences recognize how older technologies have shaped us, they can also understand that AI will inevitably shape us too and they’ll be ready to ask questions, just as they did about earlier technologies. There are debates about AI. “Is this snake oil and what will it do?” People want to know whether they should be concerned and my response is “yes, you should be concerned and you should feel empowered to ask questions.” When you write books that use stories, you write differently. MR. GIPSON: You were talking about the importance of The Alchemy of Us, your book. Can you help us understand what makes a particular book topic a good topic? DR. RAMIREZ: It was part of my own evolution. I had to step away from academia for a couple of years for my brain to go through a transformation to figure out how to write this book. I wanted to write about my beloved field of materials science but the way that I learned materials science was not going to work for general audiences. That is the first thing that I had to learn. As enthusiastic as I might be about the field, people have their own baggage about science. Interestingly, there was a materials science book that came out that was similar to what I was thinking about doing. Originally—and this is part of my evolution—I was going to have several different chapters about different materials. I was going to tell you everything I knew about that material. “Let me tell you everything about carbon, about aluminum, and you’re going to like it.” That is the posture that you have as an academic. DR. LATANISION: Your vision was for the book to be written for the general public. DR. RAMIREZ: That was the original vision. However, that other book came out as I was writing my book proposal and I knew that it was not going to work. So I said what I’m going to do is shape my book differently. I’m going to use stories because stories are a billion-dollar industry. It is called Hollywood! I’m going to tell the story of these inventions and how they shaped us. I chose eight different materials and for each material I needed a vignette from history—something that happened because of this material or because this material was absent. Then there is going to be an origin story. Who made this material or who was impacted by this material? And then I was going to talk about the impact on society. Also, I start off the book with something that will hook you. The first person that you meet in The Alchemy of Us is a woman named Ruth Belville. In 1890, she had a crazy job: she lived in England and she sold time. No one knew what the precise time was back then and people who owned banks or had factories needed to know the time. She would go around with her pocket watch, which was a very precise chronometer. She’d stop at the Royal Observatory first, collect the actual time from them and then go to different parts of London, showing her watch. That was her job—she sold time. When I first heard that I thought “this is incredible.” She’s the first person you meet in the book and then that chapter discusses timekeeping. So you learn about her job, who made the original clocks and how time shaped us. All this is to say that I had to evolve as a materials scientist in order to write this book. I had to embrace stories to do that. When you write books that use stories, you write differently. There was a tremendous amount of research, too. I travelled all over the world to get the materials I needed to “rehydrate” these people. That was part of my own evolution. Writing this book was an adventure of a lifetime. DR. LATANISION: Is your target audience largely young people, or how do you decide what audience you want to reach? DR. RAMIREZ: The Alchemy of Us is a popular trade book. But when I wrote it, I structured it so that a smart 12-year-old could understand it. That came from my experience at Yale. I told the professors who gave Science Saturdays lectures to target it for smart 12-year-olds because I had talked to some folks in education and they told me that middle school is where kids get turned off from science. So I said, “Okay, explain things in a way that a smart 12-year-old could understand.” What’s fascinating is that book received a young adult award but has also done well in older adult reader categories. DR. LATANISION: If you were to look 5 years forward, what kind of books are you thinking of writing next? Do you have a list of topics that are on your mind? DR. RAMIREZ: I have beta testers—my family members. I also stumble onto stories. My mom lives in Florida and there is a fort there called the Castillo de San Marcos. The walls are made out of coquina, a sedimentary rock made from crushed shells. When the British attacked the Spaniards there, they shot at it with cannonballs for almost a month. If the walls had been made of brick, they would have shattered and crashed to the ground. But that’s not what happened. The walls swallowed the cannonballs, burrowing into them like earthworms. When I learned this, I said, “What?!” Here I am as a materials scientist and am learning about this for the first time. I wanted to buy a book about it but there wasn’t one in the fort store. So that is how I decide what to write about. You asked me what I’ll be doing in 5 years. I have a whole bunch of picture books in me. I’ve written about 20. They haven’t all found homes yet so I think that some of my time will be creating my own press to get some of these things out. DR. LATANISION: You cannot build any engineering system, no matter what it is, without materials. DR. RAMIREZ: Materials are everywhere. I have a couple of picture books that are on the horizon, but I also have another book for older readers that I’m starting to work on. DR. LATANISION: I think you’re at least the third writer we’ve had as part of this series— Henry Petroski and Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, are the others. It’s always interesting to me, because somewhere deep inside, there must be a pent-up urge to write on my part. I’ve never written anything like what you folks have written, but writing is something I just find interesting. Were you always interested in writing, or is it something you had to cultivate? DR. RAMIREZ: I think you have it in you, Ron because if you’re saying that, it’s true. When I was a professor, I was a writer because I was doing experiments so I could write about them. You might have been focusing on the experiment. I was focused on, “I can’t wait to share this part.” I think that professors are naturally writers. Some scientific journals are dry, but others contain beautiful language. You have to write things concisely to get a lot of information across and make sure someone else can repeat the process. It’s really a craft. I knew that craft well, but I had to learn a new one. Writing for the public is very different from writing for journals. DR. LATANISION: That’s what I was about to say. What kind of research did you do when you were at Yale? DR. RAMIREZ: I worked on shape-memory alloys, specifically, nickel-titanium alloys. The reason I found them fascinating was that I could heat a wire with a match and it would change shape. I was interested in looking at those phase changes. We did a lot of work with electron microscopy to learn about how the transformation happens when we make thin films of it. When you have a metal wire, it operates one way. But when it’s a thin film, it operates differently. We did a lot of work to figure out how to explain what that mechanism was on a small scale. But probably the most important work I did was with a theorist. We were able to figure out how to predict the structure that starts from an amorphous material. You can heat it up, and we can tell you what the grain size will be ahead of time. As you know, being able to predict something is always fantastic. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” MR. GIPSON: Listening to you talk about the way that your books develop and the way that book ideas come to you, reminds me of something that Toni Morrison said: “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” DR. RAMIREZ: I have that quote in The Alchemy of Us. It’s in there because I would’ve loved to have read my book that as a kid—I’m not propping myself up, but there are other ways to understand materials science. Ron, how many textbooks about materials science do you have? DR. LATANISION: It is a huge number. I’m not sure. DR. RAMIREZ: Are they all very different from each other? DR. LATANISION: Materials science is a pretty broad field. I have books on physical metallurgy. I have books on electrochemical properties and materials and so on. It is a huge, long list. DR. RAMIREZ: It’s a huge field, but once we figure out what physical metallurgy is or what the introduction to materials science is, there is not a whole lot of variation in terms of how we explain it. I think I would have liked to have seen a little bit more. I would have liked to have known more about who the people behind materials science were. Who is Henry Bessemer? What is his story? And J.J. Thomson? When I found out that Henry Bessemer had severe bouts of seasickness, he became very interesting to me. And when I found out that J.J. Thomson was so absent-minded that one day his wife chased after him because she thought he didn’t have his pants on because he had left pants on the bed and decided to wear another pair. I would have liked to have seen some more depth to these folks. So again, as Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” DR. LATANISION: One thing that you have done in your career that I think is really difficult is to have written effectively for expert audiences and non-expert audiences, including young readers. That is such a broad range. For The Bridge readers—for people in engineering and who are wondering, “How can I make my writing more accessible?” or who are interested in reaching broader audiences—what advice would you give to them? DR. RAMIREZ: I think when I was a person who was a professor, I had to eat a lot of humble pie. When you’re a professor, you think you know everything because the whole system tells you that you know everything. If I want to write for children and I’m not an expert in that, then I have to be willing to go to people who write in this field and say, “Does this work?” Writers use these things called critique groups. In the humanities, they do this all the time. You write something. You workshop it. You bring it to another group of people. They look at it and they tell you what could be enhanced and what the strengths are. In the sciences, we do that in peer review, but it’s very distant from the creative process because we use it after we have written things. In the humanities, it’s done in the early stages. As such, I had to learn a new culture. I had to embrace being a beginner. I don’t know everything. I’m smart, but I have to be willing to try new things and realize that another culture has a way to do this. I guess I would say to the folks reading The Bridge: If you are moving into a new field, you have to be a beginner, but you have to be a good beginner. You cannot go in saying, “I know everything.” You will miss things if you come from a posture of not being receptive and flexible. DR. LATANISION: Obviously you enjoy writing and you’re good at writing. But it strikes me that you need to reach kids who are a target audience. Do you speak to groups routinely? How do you manage that? DR. RAMIREZ: I have been on speaking tours, and that put me in front of a lot of kids. For this new book that’s coming out, I have scheduled talks at a lot of local libraries and a couple of schools as well. I’ll also be on some podcasts. What I hope to do is get librarians excited about the book, because if they’re excited about it, they’ll put it on their shelves and that’s how it will reach kids. For me, the pathway is through librarians. DR. LATANISION: That’s a good point. Again, thinking of my grandchildren, I wrote a book for them. It’s a personal biography, with a little bit of history. I grew up in a household where I couldn’t speak to my grandparents. They were Polish and Ukrainian, and they never learned to speak English. And I thought, I wish I had known more about them. I wrote a book for my grandchildren based on that beginning. I had a lot of fun doing it. DR. RAMIREZ: Wonderful. DR. LATANISION: One of the things that has always interested me is the avenues for people to write things like that, especially for academics. You get so involved in academia. When I was teaching at MIT, I didn’t have time to write anything except proposals and books. How do you instill in professional engineers and scientists the wisdom that you have shown us today—trying to reach out to young people, encouraging and inspiring them. I’m thinking about your book on Jim West, Spark. It’s a very inspirational book. How do you get to the point where you can choose a topic that you feel will make that happen? How did you do that? DR. RAMIREZ: For the folks reading The Bridge, I understand that they have lots of time constraints, so maybe they can’t write a book on their own. But I do know that children’s book authors need consultants. They want to make sure the science is accurate. If someone reaches out, then be willing to work with them. This is how you can change how children relate to science because if they have your credibility and your expertise, the book is going to be better. That’s one thing they can do. When people go on sabbatical or after they’re done with their professional careers and want to retire, they can also explore children’s books. Henry Petroski—he was just so prolific. He would write articles for American Scientist, and then those things became part of his books. He found some time to do that. Maybe he just took a couple of hours on Friday to do it. If it’s important to you, carve out time for it. DR. LATANISION: It’s interesting. I knew Henry pretty well. He and I served on the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board for about 10 years together. We traveled the world together. It was while he was writing some of these books. He was a charming fellow; a brilliant writer and a great human being. I sense in our conversation today that we’ve met another one who qualifies for some of those characterizations. Ainissa, I want to thank you for joining us. I’ve enjoyed this enormously. I have a great fascination for watching kids. The people I taught at MIT in my lab are like an extended family. I appreciate what you’re doing. I just want to give you a round of applause for taking that initiative. You are a real credit to the engineering profession. DR. RAMIREZ: Thank you. It is so touching, because I have to say, when I first left academia, I felt like I might be making a mistake. But now I feel that I am doing the work that I was designed to do. About the Author:Ainissa Ramirez is materials scientist, writer, and science communicator