By Hannah McLucas, Contributing Writer
On Sept. 17 Susquehanna held a virtual 2020 Common Reading lecture for this past year’s anthology titled, “Are You Curious?”
The guest speaker for the lecture, who has an interview featured in the anthology, was Emily Graslie, the chief curiosity correspondent at Chicago’s Field Museum. She is also the co-creator and host of the YouTube channel “The Brain Scoop.” The Field Museum’s website describes the channel as, “an educational YouTube channel that explores behind-the-scenes of the Field Museum in order to share the work of scientists and the value of research collections with the world.”
Graslie began by explaining that her job as a chief curiosity correspondent is a position that was created for her. Then, she explained the journey she took to get to where she is now. Surprisingly, Graslie admitted that she did not take any science classes in college but rather she was a studio art major at the University of Montana. She had an interest in painting landscapes and stuck with that focus throughout her college career. Towards the end of college, Graslie discovered her interest in the creativity of science after visiting her school’s zoological museum. Graslie decided to start an internship with the museum to create an art portfolio based on the zoological collections. After graduation, she remained as a volunteer at the museum as her passion continued to grow.
She acknowledged the fact that she happened to meet the right person at the right time in Hank Green, a popular educational YouTuber. He saw that she was blogging her experiences at the museum and he reached out to her about a new educational YouTube channel him and his brother were creating called, “Crash Course.” He went to her museum and made a video of a tour of the zoology collection and within a few days the video had a quarter of a million views. So, with this video’s success she was given her own YouTube channel called, “The Brain Scope” to display her passion in the field.
Graslie began generating content for her channel, her first few videos being a five-part series about the taxidermy process of a wolf which she dissected. One of the organizations who noticed her videos was the Field Museum in Chicago, the third largest natural history museum in the United States; they wanted her to create a video about a conference they were holding. While she was there visiting, the Field Museum offered her a new position just for her on the spot, and to this day Graslie remains in shock about the offer, “I am still surprised, and this happened seven years ago.”
Today, her YouTube channel has gained over half a million followers and she has been able to create over 220 videos about natural history. She described her videos as being all over the place, just like her brain. Some videos she does are tours of the museum’s collections and overviews of different animal species.
To recognize her science education efforts the scientists at the University of Florida named a new species of butterfly after her called the Wahydra graslieae.
