Sherry Seethaler is a science writer and educator at the University of California, San Diego. She also writes a weekly column for the San Diego Union-Tribune in which she answers readers' questions spanning nearly every imaginable science topic from "Why do I sneeze when I look toward the sun?" to "Is a lightsaber possible?" to "Is one horsepower really equal to the power of one horse?" to "Why do lizards do push-ups" to "What causes out-of-body experiences?" That last question really does fall under the purview of science! You can read the answers to these and 345 other questions in Seethaler's books, Curious Folks Ask: 162 Real answers on amazing inventions, fascinating products, and medical mysteries (FT Press Science, 2010) and Curious Folks Ask 2: 188 Real answers on our fellow creatures, our planet, and beyond (FT Press Science, 2011).
Seethaler earned a bachelor of science in biochemistry and chemistry from the University of Toronto, a Master of Science and a Master of Philosophy in biology from Yale University and a Doctor of Philosophy in science and mathematics education from the University of California, Berkeley. She has studied theories of learning and the extensive literature on people's alternative ideas about mathematical and scientific concepts. Her dissertation research examined how eighth-grade students and undergraduates make sense of scientific controversy, with a focus on the genetic engineering of food.
Her passion is to help people rediscover the wonder about science that we all shared as children, before we had concluded that science meant facts to be memorized from a textbook. Back then science meant bugs and slugs, trees and seas, stars and scars, rocks and... (well, you get the picture). Science is also a way of approaching problems and a way of thinking about the world that we can each apply to making better reasoned health, political and consumer decisions. Unfortunately, precollege and even college science classes often fail to teach us how to do this. To fill that gap, her book Lies, Damned Lies, and Science: How to sort through the noise around global warming, the latest health claims, and other scientific controversies (FT Press Science, 2009) is an empowering yet palatable set of tools for making sense of the health and science-related issues we encounter in our daily lives.
