Elizabeth landau cnn biography of donald

It was really amazing for me to be involved in early conversations with the scientists about how these planets might look, just based on data plots. I really liked writing short fiction when I was in high school. Each of the courses required an application, and I was actually rejected several times. I showed up to his first class and talked my way into staying on.

David taught me a lot about developing distinct voices for characters and finding inspiration for stories. Because I pushed back against the initial rejection and developed stories I was proud of in that class, I was formally admitted to the thesis-writing program.

Elizabeth landau cnn biography of donald

My senior year, I got to fulfill my dream of studying with Joyce Carol Oates, who was my thesis advisor. At that time, for my senior thesis, I wrote a novella based on my experience in Spain and my anthropology research about Spanish-Jewish history. My parents had great careers in other fields, but no one in my family is a professional writer.

When I started going in that direction, my family members saw that choice as unconventional, and thought I would come around to the idea of law school my dad is a lawyer. But I remember having lengthy conversations with friends of mine in college, the kind of conversations people go to college for— How can we build lives for ourselves that we find meaningful, beyond merely earning money?

We wanted to have careers we were passionate about and genuinely interested in, as opposed to a means to an end. I want to be constantly learning and I feel really lucky to always been able to have jobs like that. Every day I am exposed to something new—people, ideas, or ways of doing things. I used to be super shy. I was amazed by how people fluidly spoke to each other without thinking too hard about it, without appearing to have any kind of embarrassment or reservation about what they were saying.

I felt that this was super liberating and helped me better confront a whole spectrum of real-world interactions. We know now, having seen the crater up close, that there are a multitude of bright spots in that crater, and that they are made of salt, which reflects light rather than producing it. This was an image that really got me excited about working on the mission and sharing the amazing feats of Dawn.

One of the biggest challenges in science communication is characterizing uncertainty. The longer I spend at JPL, the better I understand that while our spacecraft show us wondrous things, no one study or set of data will have all the answers we want. Scientists use that data to formulate theories about the planets and the broader universe that are plausible, but not percent proven.

They are the best theories we have, but they are still theories. This is something I have thought about a lot in I working on news announcements. When I was in school, social media did not exist. Podcasts did not exist. US journalist and science communicator. Education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. NASA career [ edit ]. Writing career [ edit ].

References [ edit ]. February 4, Retrieved March 3, Retrieved Archived from the original on Best Pitch I Ever Got. Marie Claire. Scientific American. Scientific American Blog Network. Quanta Magazine. External links [ edit ].