Moiya McTier: Tales of the Cosmos
My guest on this week’s episode, Moiya McTier is the youngest guest I’ve had on INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE but she’s already accomplished so much. An astrophysicist, folklorist, and science communicator, the multiverse of Moiya extends far!
Moiya was a double major at Harvard: folklore and astrophysics. The two fields have more in common than one might think. “Myths are humankind’s earliest version of science,” says Moiya.
Moiya combined her studies into one senior thesis project — a science fiction novel set on an existing exoplanet. She included research about Hawaiian culture and the Thirty Meter Telescope. You can read her book here.
She now teaches worldbuilding through her podcast Exolore and has a Worldbuilding 101 video and worksheet that I highly recommend. One particularly remarkable episode imagines a world with no history of slavery or colonization.
Moiya spoke to me about the burden placed on her due to the intersectionality of being a woman of color. There are only 150 black women with PhDs in astronomy or physics in the U.S. With Moiya poised to become #151, she feels obligated to mentor other women of color. As Dr. Becky Smethurst spoke about on a recent episode of INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE, this requires time and energy and can detract from research, which in turn makes their tenure and other applications appear less competitive.
Moiya knows all too well the power of good mentorship, and the potentially devastating effects of a discouraging teacher. Similar to Dr. Becky, Moiya has a story of a professor who discouraged her from pursuing the very field she now excels in. In Moiya’s case, she switched to studying folklore before coming back to astrophysics.
“I decided to give science another chance,” she says. “I signed up for an astronomy class because the professor gave us free pizza. By the end of the semester, I was kind of hooked.”
I’ve heard a lot of people describe their complicated scientific research over the decades, and can definitely tell that Moiya’s storytelling education means she’s especially effective at this task. She weaves a story and that sets up the audience for engagement. And she understands just how important that skill is.
“People spread lies about science all the time,” she says. “Fiction, when it’s presented in a persuasive way, is so dangerous. That’s why I want to be a science communicator, that’s why I want to tell people the facts in engaging and persuasive ways.”
Moiya clearly enjoys her science communication work. Next up, she is writing a nonfiction book about the history and evolution of the Milky Way, written as an autobiography from the perspective of the galaxy itself. I can’t wait to read such a unique take on the subject and hope that she’ll be back on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE to promote it once it’s published!
Listen to the Exolore podcast
Find Moiya on the web and Twitter @GoAstroMo
Find Brian Keating on Twitter @DrBrianKeating and YouTube
Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2
Moiya McTier is in her fifth year of a PhD program in astronomy at Columbia University. She studied astrophysics and folklore at Harvard. Her podcast, Exolore, fosters world building — bringing science into science fiction. She is an accomplished science communicator and public speaker.
