Planet Earth

In the Amazon rainforest, and many other biodiverse regions, DNA research has traditionally depended on exporting samples to distant labs. This process is expensive and time-consuming, and can reinforce existing global inequities about who gets to use and generate DNA data. But new technologies are changing that. In this talk, I’ll share how we set up the first genetics field laboratory in the Peruvian Amazon, and what efforts like this can mean for conservation, public health, and access to science.

Look up at the night sky and you see light—from stars, from galaxies, from a Universe that has been shining for nearly 14 billion years. But everything you see, everything that has ever been seen by anyone or any telescope we ever built, makes up less than a fifth of all the matter in the Universe. The rest is just… dark. But dark matter is not empty space: it has mass, it shapes galaxies, it bends the fabric of spacetime. It is all around us, likely passing through you right now. I will tell you how we know dark matter is there, how we are searching for it using the most energetic form of light in the Universe—gamma rays—and why I'm excited to spend my days looking for something nobody has ever directly seen.