Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim


Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim is a German chemist, science communicator, television presenter and YouTuber.

Early life and education

Nguyen-Kim was born in 1987 in Heppenheim, Hessen, West Germany; her parents are from South Vietnam, her father is also a chemist. She completed the Abitur in 2006 in Hemsbach. She studied at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She worked on her doctorate at RWTH Aachen University, Harvard University, and the University of Potsdam; completing it in 2017. She rejected a job offer from BASF to focus on science communication. She is married and has a daughter born in 2020.

Career

Nguyen-Kim started the YouTube channel The Secret Life Of Scientists in 2015. She began another channel, maiLab, which is funded by German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF and as of 2020 has nearly 900,000 subscribers, in 2016.
She published on her YouTube-channel maiLab popular videos about the Coronavirus-pandemic. Her videos made it into German YouTube trends and reached several million viewers within a short time.
She also contributed a widely noticed commentary on this topic in the German news programme "Tagesthemen" and was invited as an expert in various talk shows.
On German television, Nguyen-Kim presents the science show Quarks since 2018, alongside. With Harald Lesch and she presents the online video series .
Her book Komisch, alles chemisch published in March 2019 has been on the "Spiegel" bestseller list since November 2019.

Awards

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