Physics professor’s viral videos help inspire women to pursue science

Women account for just a quarter of U.S. graduates who earn bachelor’s levels in physics, in accordance to the American Physical Society, a Maryland-based nonprofit group. But Dr. Tatiana Erukhimova, a physics professor at Texas A&M University, is having a look to alternate that with the help of social media.

Videos of her experiments have ignited other people’s interest on TikTok, drawing tens of thousands and thousands of perspectives over the past two years. 

“You cannot explain much in these short clips, but … you can inspire,” she mentioned. 

Afiya Dhanani attended Texas A&M University after staring at Erukhimova’s physics experiments on-line. 

“Watching Dr. Tatiana do the experiments online, especially since she was a female leader, was more inspiring for me to even go into physics,” Dhanani mentioned. 

Erukhimova’s adventure started 1000’s of miles away, about six hours northeast of Moscow, prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union. She grew up with two physicists as oldsters and later married a physicist, Alexey. They relocated to College Station, Texas, the place they function educators. 

“I didn’t feel home. But you make it home,” Erukhimova mentioned. 

When she is not educating, Erukhimova is thinking about outreach. In 2021, she was once thinking about a learn about that incorporated 10,000 scholars, physicists and different people within the sciences. The learn about printed that males don’t seem to be extra fitted to physics than women — a message she makes use of to at the moment. 

“We collected midterm exams, final exams, final scores, final grade grades over 10 years. There was no consistent difference between a male and female performance on these exam scores. And I felt that this was a very important message for my students,” Erukhimova mentioned. 

Former pupil Nicole Cirigioni praised Erukhimova’s enthusiasm and willpower to educating, pronouncing, “You can tell when a teacher wants to be somewhere else. But when you walk into Dr. Tatiana’s classroom, you can tell she wants you to be there. She cares and wants you to learn, which makes you want to learn, too.”   

Up subsequent for Erukhimova is the “Physics and Engineering Festival” at A&M in April, an match that attracts in 1000’s of other people to campus yearly.  This pageant is open to everybody, and in accordance to Erukhimova, you do not want to be a scientist to rejoice science, identical to you do not want to be a musician to attend a track pageant. 

Former pupil Callie Rethman mentioned Erukhimova “always wants everything to be like a celebration of science.”

“And I think that her videos going viral have really brought that celebration everywhere,” she mentioned.