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about
The tiny Beaker Story
Kate Furby started out as a scientist with a mad idea: could corals come back from the dead? Corals have an incredible ability to survive, and investigating the limits of coral survival was the focus of her thesis.
One day in the lab, she was fishing around in a big beaker for a tiny slice of coral. She was looking at thin slices of dead corals, searching them for signs of life. The intrepid lab tech, Mike, suggested she try a smaller beaker. He handed her a 5 ml beaker and the rest is history. Or, rather, she took a selfie with it, ran down the hall, showed it to all of her friends (LOOK HOW TINY AND ADORABLE THIS BEAKER IS!), and then returned to the lab to finish a day of science. At Kate's PhD defense, Mike brought the tiny beaker as a graduation present. There was only one name possible once she founded her own science media company: Tiny Beaker.
Kate Furby,PhD, Owner / Producer
Kate completed her PhD in marine biology with an interdisciplinary specialization in science communication from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2017. Her dissertation focused on coral community dynamics and recovery mechanisms in the central Pacific. She investigated coral regrowth and the limits of coral survival using ecology, biology, microscopy and genomics.
As a scientist, she studied remote, wild places most people will never see. She started producing videos and written pieces about our research as a graduate student (although there was a time she was editing High School English class Shakespeare videos on VHS....). She started #scicomm because she wanted to share her experiences as a scientist to the community and to stakeholders.