Chemistry Ph.D. Student Turned Her Thesis Into a Comic Book

Mention the word “quasicrystals” and everyone will immediately know what you’re talking about, right? Probably not. University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry Ph.D. student Veronica Berns recognized this conundrum when she began working on her thesis. Berns wanted to share her work with friends and family, but she struggled to find an accessible way to do so. Eventually, she decided that the best way to explain these divergent crystals was to diverge from the normal thesis form herself– and thus her chemistry comic book, Atomic Size Matters, was born. 

Veronica Berns

Berns’s family has a history of doodling and sharing comics, so what better way for her to involve her parents than with a medium with which they were all comfortable? At her graduation last year she surprised her parents with a comic book filled with cartoons, humor, and simple comparisons to describe her complex work. She purposely focused more on doodles than polished illustrations, telling the Associated Press that she “wanted it to be like I’m explaining [it] on the back of an envelope.” Atomic Size Matters was a big hit, and not just with Berns’s family.

Berns’s adviser, Danny Fredrickson, said that she was the first of his students to construct her thesis in an artistic way. In response to the question, “How would you communicate this to someone that doesn’t do science?,” he replied, “This. This is it!” Berns thought that perhaps others would be interested in her comic as well, and started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to print a small batch of the books. Berns raised over $14,000, more than twice what she had asked for, which helped her realize the vital role that her book could play in the learning process. “It’s really important, now more than ever, to talk about science in an accessible way,” she noted. 

VeronicaBerns.com

Berns now works as a chemist in Chicago, but she still finds time for doodling. Her latest project is a blog explaining the work of Nobel Prize winning scientists, which can be found on her website, VeronicaBerns.com.

[via The Big Story]