Introducing Mika McKinnon

Mika McKinnon is a freelance scientist mixing geophysics, disasters, and fiction into a mess of irrepressible curiosity. She’s a disaster researcher deeply in love with fluid dynamics and a bit too fascinated by landslides anywhere in this weird and wild solar system.

Mika spends her time lurking on set using science to make stranger fiction, zapping the Earth into revealing its subsurface secrets, and hunting down science to share with the public. Her work has appeared in Stargate, Dark Matter, and debatably Sharknado, and for publications including BBC, New Scientist, io9, Ars Technica, Astronomy Magazine, and others.

Mika is caretaker to an adorably grouchy hedgehog, and may be a bit too fascinated with ballgowns and crinolines. After this week, you can keep up with her latest adventures at @mikamckinnon

Introducing Molly Peeples

Molly Peeples (@astronomolly) is an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. She studies how galaxies change through time, with a focus on the origin and fate of the heavy elements, which has led her to a several year obsession over the extensive gaseous halos surrounding galaxies known as the circumgalactic medium. Molly considers herself a theorist, but is often found working closely with data and instruments, in an ongoing pursuit of getting fake data to look like real data. When she isn’t traveling, cooking, or hiking (and sometimes when she is), Molly also works on the Hubble Space Telescope and preparing for the WFIRST mission.