I led the Webby Award Winning Beautiful Biology initiative at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus.
Beautiful Biology is an open science initiative that strives to engage the public, educators and students in the life sciences by utilizing microscopy and macrophotography images and videos as a hook to inspire a sense of awe and curiosity in users. This is a completely free and open access initiative allowing the public and educators access to high-quality research visuals, and accessibly written information about those visuals, for educational or entertainment purposes.
My responsibilities as head of the project were to: develop and implement the overall strategic goals for the initiative, find and solicit visual content to host on the website (including acquiring and storing usage agreements for content from contributors outside the HHMI network), draft and refine accessibly written text that accompanies the visuals on the website and social media, manage the internal Beautiful Biology team as well as a large number of external contractors, develop and manage program partners, develop social media content for HHMI channels, manage the digital database, collaborate with other HHMI initiatives such as BioInteractive to create educator focused content on the website, manage outreach and promotion.
Example Social Media Videos
These are short explainer videos designed for social media featuring myself explaining what viewers are seeing in the content behind me and a little bit of the biology behind the visual.