As a magician, Jason is the series champion of the BBC One’s The Magicians, the recipient of Siegfried & Roy’s Masters of the Impossible Award, and was bestowed with magic’s highest honor, “Grand Prix ‘Best Overall’ World Champion of Magic.” With his undefeated resume of championship wins, Jason is one of the judges with Penn & Teller on SyFy Channel’s magic competition Wizard Wars. In 2018, Jason joins David Copperfield and David Blaine as one of the few recipients of the prestigious and highly coveted Golden Grolla Award from the Masters of Magic.
As a scientist, Jason is the creator of “Impossible Science” the academic platform uniting magic and science to inspire wonder in education, which has now become a popular YouTube channel with millions of views. Latimer is the Curator of Impossible Science of the iconic Fleet Science Center in San Diego, CA but his STEM program has expanded to science centers throughout Southern California. Impossible Science labs, festivals, exhibitions, live shows, and digital series with Comic Con HQ have inspired hundreds of thousands of visitors to embrace their ability to ask a question. Currently, the Fleet Science Center is in construction of a new exhibition wing to permanently offer Impossible Science for the next 10 years. While in Downey, CA, Impossible Science Festival with the Columbia Memorial Space Center has grown to become the official LA Science Festival “City of STEM.” Recently, Engineering.com and Latimer launched the Impossible Science Student Challenge, a competition of thousands of participating schools across the US and Canada to find the classroom doing the most to inspire curiosity within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Jason also co-hosts the Science Channel series SciJinks with Big Bang Theory’s Johnny Galecki and Mythbusters: The Search’s Tamara Robertson. At Education First’s Global Leadership Summit, in both New York and Berlin, Jason follows previous keynote speakers Al Gore and Dr. Jane Goodall with his keynote address on The Influence of Technology on Society. While in Washington DC, at the largest science festival in the country (370,000+ Attendees) and following last year’s speaker Elon Musk, Jason gave the closing keynote of the USA Science and Engineering Festival on Impossible Science and Education Through Curiosity.
Jason Latimer is not only changing education, he is on a mission to globally inspire wonder.
The Radium Girls is the first-ever narrative non-fiction account of this inspirational true story. Kate first discovered the story of the radium girls when she directed the play These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich, which dramatizes the experiences of the Ottawa dial-painters; this production played in two theatres in London in 2015, including a transfer to the Pleasance, and won critical acclaim. While conducting research for the play, she realized there was no book that focused on the women and told their story in their own words. Feeling passionate that the women deserved such a book, she decided to write it.
Kate’s research took her all over America – to Newark and Orange, New Jersey; to New York and Washington, DC; and to Chicago and Ottawa, Illinois. She walked in the women’s footsteps and met their families; visited their homes and graves; stood in the lobby of Grossman’s office and at the sites of the dial-painting studios, and remembered the radium girls. She hopes, through her book, that you will do the same.
Dr. Jacobs holds the title of “Wizard IV”; presented to him by the Royal Institution of Great Britain With three university degrees, nearly two decades of teaching, plus experience with fifteen media production companies including Nickelodeon, Paramount Television, Science Channel, Discovery Health, National Geographic, FOX Television, Disney, National Public Radio (NPR), and the Smithsonian Institution under his belt, Jake was an ideal fit as consultant for many programs produced by Discovery Communications.
Along with NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino, Jake is the on-air host of National Geographic Television’s Known Universe. You can also find Wizard IV at many social media sites under the banner of Midnight Science Club.
Dianna researched dark matter with Prof. Jocelyn Monroe as an undergraduate at MIT, and low-metallicity stars with Prof. Anna Frebel as a post-baccalaureate research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, before working at GE as a software engineer designing mobile apps.
Dianna is a science communicator talking about the future of education and how to better relate to students using various medias. Dianna says: “I love how physics can explain the weird quirks of our universe.” She has been featured in FORBES, Science Magazine, Popular Science, Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, Space.com, and Nerdist.
Dr. Bruce Betts is Chief Scientist and LightSail Program Manager for The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest group. Dr. Betts is a planetary scientist who earned a B.S. in physics and math and an M.S. in Applied Physics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Planetary Science with a minor in Geology from Caltech. He spent several years with San Juan Institute/Planetary Science Institute as a Research Scientist, and later Senior Research Scientist. He studied planetary surfaces, including Mars, the Moon, and Jupiter’s moons, using infrared and other data, and published several scientific papers on these subjects. Dr. Betts spent three years at NASA headquarters managing planetary instrument development programs to design spacecraft science instruments.
At The Planetary Society, he has had copious project management experience, having managed a number of flight instrument (both science and public outreach) projects, including silica glass DVDs on the Mars Exploration Rovers and Phoenix lander carrying millions of names and Mars literature, the LIFE biology experiment that flew on the Russian Phobos sample return mission, and he led a NASA grant studying microrovers assisting human exploration. He is the Program Manager for The Planetary Society’s LightSail solar sail missions. He has also overseen or managed a number of additional projects designed to excite and involve the public in space exploration.
Dr. Betts is the author of Astronomy for Kids: How to Explore Outer Space with Binoculars, a Telescope, or Just Your Eyes! He regularly writes for The Planetary Society member magazine The Planetary Report, and on his blog on planetary.org. His twitter feed @RandomSpaceFact provides easy night sky astronomy and random space facts, and his Random Space Fact videos provide facts and humor in brief segments. He also co-hosts the “What’s Up?” feature on the weekly Planetary Radio show (150 radio stations, XM/Sirius satellite radio, and podcast). He is a frequent guest on History Channel’s The Universe. Dr. Betts is an Adjunct Professor with California State University Dominguez Hills and his most recent Introduction to Astronomy and Planetary Science course is available for free online. He is an Alumnus Senior Scientist with Planetary Science Institute.