MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: TAYLOR NYSTROM

Could you tell us who you are and what it is that you do?

Greetings! My name is Taylor, and I am the Director of Curriculum and On-Screen Instructor at an Edtech startup called Biobuddy. I’m developing curriculum as we build out a teaching resource for science teachers and a learning resource for anyone who wants to learn biology! 

What do you love about the work?

 Ooooo, I love that I am encouraged to go in the direction of my basic curiosity and questions about the world around me. One thing that is SO cool about biological processes is that they are all around us and inside of us and everywhere all the time. The biggest goal of my job is to explain these biological processes and concepts in a way that is accessible, and I try to do this by bringing them to people in a real world context.  So that means when I have a question about the world, I can learn about it and then use it to do my job. I’ve literally spent days researching the most basic biology behind how different kinds of soap work or how enzymes affect bread rise or the spread of the lantern fly or why African violets have such diverse color patterns, and then used those things to write lessons about surface tension, enzymatic function, evolution, and genetics. 

Also, on a base level - I love science and I LOVE teaching, and my job is essentially getting excited about and teaching science to students all over the world, so I am pretty enamoured with that. 

How did you arrive at this point in your career? What’s your backstory?

Did I mention that I love science? I do! I love science as a tool box to help answer questions about the world around me. I lived in NYC for a few years right after graduating and during that time, I taught science at a middle school in Brooklyn. I genuinely loved it, but felt very limited by having to teach to a standardized test and curriculum. I realized that I was most passionate about developing materials that would teach the concepts necessary to pass a standardized test, while also bringing to life just how COOL science is. With this in mind, I applied for a bunch of jobs at organizations that did just that. After never getting hired, I started to notice that the person who did get the job almost always had a PhD. So, in 2019 I went back to school to do my PhD at UVA.

In a lucky twist of fate, during my second year of grad school, I was approached by a post-bac student at UVA who wanted to start a science education company and asked if I wanted to be the on-screen instructor. I said yes, we spent the next 3 years building out the materials to launch Biobuddy, and he hired me full time after I graduated!

Has there been a 'light switch' moment, a turning point (or two), professionally &/or personally along the way?

There was a time that I thought I might want to do research full-time, so I did research full-time at Columbia for several years between when I graduated undergrad and started teaching. While I was working at Columbia, I spent a lot of time volunteering with their science education outreach program. I loved working in the lab, but one day I realized that what I loved most about my job was going to community events and getting people excited about science. At that point it became really clear to me that I wanted to work in science education, rather than research.

Who or what has been your greatest influence? 

My mom is a pretty big nerd, and she always shares new things that she has learned with me. She also always points out the tiny miracles in the world around us. Both of these things have always nurtured my curiosity and made the world so much more alive and exciting to me.

What are you currently working on, excited about, looking forward to?

One small part of my job is that I get to make these reels with fun facts that are really just answers to questions that I have. Filming them is fun and silly, and I’ve actually learned so much in writing scripts for them. Anyway, I’ve got some fun, random collaborations coming up for them, so I’m pretty excited about that.

What are you reading, watching, listening to these days?

I recently finished Just Kids by Patti Smith, and now I am reading a book called The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger. It’s a book about how absolutely bananas plants are. It opens with this quote from ethnobotantist Timothy Plowman that I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about since I read it - “They can eat light, isn’t that enough?” 

Anything we missed that you might care to share (closing thoughts)?

I think music and art and sports are viewed as so accessible, and they enrich people's lives! Like…you don’t have to be a musician to sing along to a song, you don’t have to be an artist to enjoy doodling, you don’t have to be an athlete to enjoy play; and I’ve always just loved the idea that you don’t need to be a scientist to do and appreciate science, you know? Science can also be this thing that is accessible and enriches lives!