Liberty Science Center’s Post

Transcript

My name is Kengo Yamada. I'm the director of Early Childhood Experiences. My role here is to help deliver, design, and coordinate all of our on site, off site programming for children below the age of seven. Doctor Jenny Wang from Rutgers University reached out to us about collaborating with the Liberty Science Center to do some research on site. She worked with Liberty Science Center previous to my time here, so she wanted to see if we were interested in partnering up and collaborating again. And I was very much interested in that. I really loved the idea of having our work continually grounded and heavy research. My name is Edith Podas. I am a PhD student in Rockers. I'm Kathleen Cracknell. I'm also a PhD graduate student at Rutgers. LSD is actually our biggest collaborator, and it's really exciting to be here because we've learned through all of our conversations with the LC team that we have this really big shared goal of reaching out and interacting with the local community and New Jersey. Being in Liberty Science Center gives our Rutgers students a big chance in bringing the research, the scientific field to the actual. You know, social role and bringing it to the community. We're really, really big into community engagement and sharing the research findings that we have with the public. This collaboration, I think I never wanted to end really because it's just such a really good opportunity for me to bring the things that we're learning about child development back to the community and being able to engage not only the children and the conversation with the parents and the conversation. We see ourselves as being very valuable for kind of representing scientists. The public also, so scientists can be men and women. Scientists can be of any like, race. You can come from diverse backgrounds and still pursue science. There's place for everyone in science. And also as female role models, we want to model that to the, you know, community that the divers come into that visits the Liberty Science Center. So we think that all of us, all of this gives us a big opportunity to really bridge the two worlds. Yeah. When people hear the word research and especially child research. A lot of people don't really know what to expect or what that looks like. And so just being able to stand here in the Liberty Science Center together and look through our, you know, half glass wall and say we're doing research right now. You see how this kids excitedly searching for stickers under a bucket. That's telling us so much rich information about what that child understands. And I think it opens up a lot of parents interest in child development research. So it's kind of a huge win win. It's like we're enriching the families lives. By letting them into our world, but then also maybe they're more excited to join our world and we're better able to do the work that we want to do. And you have two year tenure that they've been here. They've been bringing a lot of different studies to help contribute to generating new knowledge. And it's just been a pleasure having us be able to show our guests that we're continually trying to grow in our work and seeing how we can further our collaboration with Rutgers University. So I'm really looking forward to the long term growth of our relationship. Together.