Science communicator and Youtuber
Who is Diana Cowern?
Dianna Cowern is the creator of Physics Girl. Driving tractors on a farm in Hawaii where she grew up somehow led to science and engineering pursuits. Nicknamed “happy pants” in college, Dianna researched dark matter with Prof. Jocelyn Monroe as an undergraduate at MIT, and low-metallicity stars with Prof. Anna Frebel as a post-baccalaureate research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, before bringing her happy intern pants to GE where she worked as a Software Engineer designing mobile apps.
Eventually, she started exercising the nerdy side of her brain on YouTube as Physics Girl before (and while) heading over to UCSD as a science outreach coordinator. She loves to surf, SCUBA dive and play the ukulele. Her YouTube channel, Physics Girl, is a resource for fun physics videos and other science materials. Initially started as a post-college personal project, it has grown into a resource for teachers, a source of entertainment for physics nerds, and a way to share a passion for physics while advocating for women in STEM.
When asked how she got started, Diana said this: “It really started in high school. I watched a series by Neil deGrasse Tyson about space, and I thought, “Wow, that’s so cool! He does science communication on top of the science.” That’s when I made my first science video. Terrible execution, but the passion was there. I went through school, and I felt this pressure to be a scientist or to get a real job, as my parents would put it. But I always had this underlying passion to do science communication. When I graduated, I started this for fun.”
There are plenty of different ways to show your passion, and Diana has made this one her full-time job.
3 Things We Love About Diana Cowern:
- She loves to surf, SCUBA dive and play the ukulele.
- Cowern won a school competition to paint the cover of her school yearbook, and since then she has been fascinated by science and art.
- In 2014, she won the top video prize from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at SUNY Stony Brook.
Work Cited
Meet Physics Girl, the YouTuber who makes a living explaining science