Ainissa Ramirez


Ainissa Ramirez is an American materials scientist and science communicator.

Education

Ramirez earned a Sc.B. in Materials Science from Brown University in 1990. She earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 1998.

Career

Ramirez gave a TED talk in 2012 on the main stage in Los Angeles on the importance of STEM education. She has been a visiting professor at MIT. From 2003 to 2011 she was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Mechanical and Materials Science Department at Yale University, where she taught an undergraduate course entitled "Introduction to Materials Science". Prior to being on the faculty at Yale, for four years she was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies.
She co-developed a "universal solder" that can bond metal to glass, ceramics, diamond, and semiconductor oxide substrates.
After 10 years at Yale, Ramirez made a career change from academia and became a self-declared "science evangelist".
She hosts two short science video series called and . In 2004, she founded Science Saturdays, a program of entertaining science lectures for middle school children. She also produces a podcast series called .
She is the 2015 winner of the , for doing "a brave thing" and not only producing research, but encouraging everyone to think about science. The award is sponsored by the American Institute of Physics.
Her journey of being a science evangelist was published in .
She has authored several books. Her most recent is one that examines how technology shaped culture. It is called