In the fall of 2010 one of Emily Graslie’s classmates suggested that she visit the zoological museum at the University of Montana, where she was a senior majoring in studio art, to which Graslie replied, “What’s a zoological museum?” Today, she works at the Field Museum, where her job, essentially, is to answer that question.
Graslie started volunteering full-time as the museum’s curatorial assistant, working in a bakery to help pay the bills, and began taking online classes for a master’s degree in museum studies through Johns Hopkins. In addition to giving tours, preparing specimens, and helping with undergraduate classes, she hoped to publicize the work of the museum. She did this as part of an uphill battle for more funding and space, but also because she wanted to share her newfound love of zoology. “I just thought, ‘I’m going to clean three bighorn sheep heads today—I think that’s kind of remarkable. Maybe I’ll start a blog.’”
If Graslie has a trademark, besides the red nail polish she always wears, it’s how she introduces scientific topics to her viewers in a way that’s simultaneously zealous and nonchalant. In her first episode, she describes the museum’s bird room as “arguably my favorite room in the entire collection, if not the whole universe of the world” before pointing out a raccoon she found “behind a cabinet a couple of months ago” and noting, “we also have a bunny on the floor but he’s only got one ear.”
Then, in February 2013, Graslie called the Field Museum to ask if she and her producer could fly to Chicago in April to film the Field’s annual members’ night, when museum supporters are given access to the collections and to the curators and scientists. The museum agreed. Graslie recalls that on the last day of her visit “the Field Museum totally pulled a fast one on me.” She was asked to come to a meeting to give feedback on the members’ night from an outsider’s perspective. Once she was in the room, Bill Stanley, the collections curator, told her that the Field was interested in producing a show like the Brain Scoop—and that the museum wanted to enlist her to do it. “I said yes right there,” Graslie says.
The move to Chicago has also raised Graslie’s profile in the scientific community, and she’s grown into her role not just as a host but as an advocate for science education—and particularly for women in science. Her largest audience is women between the ages of 13 and 18, she says, “young women who have always had an interest in science and are starting to wonder if they should take it more seriously. If I was that age watching my show, I would want that reassurance—that what I was interested in was cool, that people would still like me and think I’m funny even if I’m into weird gross stuff that nobody else was talking about.”
I ask her if she feels prepared to be a feminist science icon. “I don’t. I don’t feel prepared. I didn’t have my shit together,” she says, and then, “bleep that out because I’m supposed to be a good role model.” She thinks that the best way for her to advocate for women in science is “just by doing it, just by acting in the position I am, continuing to do what I’m doing.”
