Becoming a Scientist: Stories about what it means to be a scientist

This week, we present two stories about the path to becoming a scientist and what makes a scientist a scientist.

Part 1: Andrea Jones-Rooy quits her job as a scientist in order to become a scientist.

Part 2: While studying flying foxes in Indonesia, Susan Tsang gets caught in a rainstorm that changes her relationship to field work.

Andrea Jones-Rooy is a scientist, comedian, and circus performer. She's a professor of data science at NYU, where she also directs their undergraduate program in data science. When she's not doing that, she's regaling audiences around NYC, the world, and the Internet with her Opinions in the form of standup comedy. When she's not doing either of those things, she's hanging from some kind of aerial apparatus (usually, but not exclusively, a trapeze) and/or holding something that is on fire. When she's not doing ANY of those things, she's either hosting her podcast Majoring in Everything, losing to her mother on Words with Friends, or eating Dr. Cow's raw vegan nut cheese.

Dr. Susan Tsang works as a private consultant through her company Biodiversitas Global LLC, and continues to conduct research through her Research Associate affiliations with the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the Philippines. She provides subject matter expertise on and creates programs and activities to address illegal wildlife trade, disease ecology, and other global sustainable development challenges. As a researcher, her primary interest is in the evolution and biogeography of Southeast Asian flying foxes, the world's largest bats, which has led her to working with some of the most threatened yet poorly known bat species in the world. Along with her Southeast Asian colleagues, she has carried out conservation work both at the community and transnational levels, with some of her ongoing projects in Indonesia focused on local empowerment for reducing bat hunting. She also serves on the steering committee of the Southeast Asian Bat Conservation Research Unit and the Global Union of Bat Diversity Networks to address larger capacity building and assessment/policy needs and has been appointed as a member of the IUCN Bat Specialist Group and the Global Bat Taxonomy Working Group.

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