 What do you do at the museum?
I’ve been working as the developer in charge of Underground Adventure, an exhibit about soil biodiversity and ecology and also about the human connection to soil. About a third of the exhibit is an immersion experience in soil, modeled at 100 times life size.
As an Exhibit Developer, I'm responsible for shaping the subject matter into an exhibit plan that communicates effectively with visitors. This involves content research and working with subject matter specialists to determine the scope of the content. It also involves working with designers and other exhibit professionals to come up with exhibit elements that are engaging and can communicate points clearly and concisely.
Most importantly, it involves developing a thorough knowledge of the visitors. Every exhibit weaves a content "story" of some sort. We don't know where to begin the story unless we know how much visitors know, or don't know, about a subject. So an Exhibit Developer's job is to create an exhibit story that builds a bridge between the visitor and the content.
How did you become interested in your field?
When I was a child, my two favorite places to go were Brookfield Zoo and the Field Museum. My parents took me to both places often, and those visits helped inspire my love of animals and nature.
After graduating from Purdue, where I studied biology and medical technology, I worked in a biochemistry research lab at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center. The problem-solving aspect of original research was exciting, and after a while, I wanted to try the challenge of my own research. So after a few years, I left Rush and returned to school to pursue a graduate degree in evolutionary biology.
At the University of Chicago, I studied animal behavior and ecology, with a special emphasis on mother and infant behavior in hoofed mammals. During this time, I developed several acquaintances at the Field Museum. Through them, I learned of a job opening with the exhibit team working on the renovation of the bird and mammal halls. I applied, and got the job.
Over the past eight years, I've come to realize how important informal science education experiences like museums are. I feel that I've finally found my niche.
 What do you love about what you do?
It’s exciting to me to have a job where I can keep learning new and fascinating things. I really love that part of it. Even though I’m a biologist working on biology exhibits, I never took a botany course, and so if I work on the plant hall, I’ll learn a lot about botany and that will be valuable.
I also like interacting with a wide variety of people. In this job you get to interact with Ph.D. scientists, with artists, with a huge range of people, and I think that’s neat. I’ve come to like the team process even though it’s painful sometimes.
In my work I can come up with neat ideas but because I’m not an artist I can’t visualize what I want very well. I think it is so cool to be able to articulate my ideas to someone and have them make it a reality through design and production. It’s so amazing to get to the stage of the exhibit where these things that have been just ideas on paper suddenly have a reality to them.
And then to have a million people come and see the exhibit is really exciting. There’s almost a child-like aspect to it--being able to dream dreams and have them become reality and then be able to share those. When I break my job down to its purest, most wonderful aspect, that’s what it feels like to me.
How does conservation fit into your work and life?
I’m a fairly ardent conservationist. I’ve always had a feel for it but never looked at it politically until the last 5 or 6 years. When I first came to Exhibits I felt we were not supposed to have any advocacy for certain things. But I have evolved to a point where I think no, we are about advocacy, because if we as an institution are concerned with all these different species of plants and animals and concerned about all these wonderfully diverse cultures, then we have to make sure they are preserved.
At the same time I see the importance of balance more than I used to. Conservation isn’t going to work unless you meet everybody’s needs and people aren’t going to be inspired to conserve if all they have to do is give things up. But if they can see the benefits, then I think you can inspire people to conserve. Part of the problem is that a lot of the benefits are not immediate. So you have to educate people, but it’s hard.
I really feel conservation is not a doomsday message, but more a matter of helping people understand how the Earth and science matter to them.
Are there ways gender issues have affected your career?
I have this theory of why so many women drop out of graduate school. I think it’s because maybe women perceive more options. A man who gets on the Ph.D. track thinks, "What the heck would I do if I didn’t get this Ph.D.?" A woman might recognize that there are plenty of other things she could do. I think women are better at having a rich life outside of work--their whole direction isn’t wrapped up in that job.
There were careers I probably didn’t even think of because I was a girl, and I do think I suffered from a feeling of inadequacy because I was a female--you know, that thing that seems to afflict a lot of women. But in some ways I think I’m doing what I’m doing because I did perceive more options that a man maybe wouldn’t have.
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educational activities are working and on how to improve our effectiveness in communicating educational messages to visitors. Right now I think we do visitor studies in varying degrees in varying places. I’d like to see them done more consistently.