How Reyhaneh Maktoufi transforms science through story

National Geographic

5 hours ago

Reyhaneh Maktoufi loves a good story. She uses it to make sense of the world.
Her own storytelling style leans into humor. 'As most people who are artists will tell you, I often scribbled in a notebook, doodling. Eventually, I saw that my bad drawings resonated with people,' she says. Sometimes the stories she tells are visual — comics and animations that break down complex concepts into digestible and entertaining narratives. Other times she's a writer and orator.
'I am an alien,' she declared in Maktoufi fashion from the TEDx stage in 2017, then turning a technical glitch with her slides into an impromptu reflection on her life as an immigrant. In front of the live audience she improvised that the glitch was attributable to her extraterrestrial 'powers,' and used the moment to explore how her Iranian-American identity shapes her work bridging scientific communities and the public.
Maktoufi is a science communication specialist, social science researcher and National Geographic Explorer who obtained her doctorate in media, technology and society with a focus on science.
Her start in bridging the gap between scientific and common language seven years ago at the Adler Planetarium Space Visualization Lab was, as she puts it, 'the perfect environment for an alien,' surrounded by space images, moon rocks and in a place 'not obsessed with national boundaries,' she explains. Here, she began a journey of investigating a deceptively simple question: What makes people curious about science?
She aims to make scientific knowledge more accessible by humanizing important and often complex work. 'Numbers matter a lot, but we have to make them imaginable and tangible.'