Carol Kaesuk Yoon

After logging thousands of miles around the globe to glimpse one exotic creature or another, Carol Yoon was shocked to make the scientific find of her life while glancing out her living room window. There resting on the glass was a species-- a dazzling iridescent moth-- that had never before been seen alive in North America. In this talk, Yoon takes audiences along on what became her quixotic quest to discover every possible species in, on and around her modest urban home and yard. Venturing from back steps to rooftop to the surprising array of species in the condiments in her refrigerator alone, Yoon finds life everywhere showing us that even in the most mundane of locales, we are each immersed daily in mad kaleidoscope of wild species. This talk inspires us to discover the life within our own lives and explore the living world that is-- and always has been-- a whirlwind of change full of exciting new discoveries just waiting to be made.

Deep inside of every person, there lies a powerful drive, one that has long shaped human behavior: the urge to order and name living things. In this talk, Carol Yoon tells the story of this human mandate which, for better and worse, has shaped both the progress of science and humanity's deep disconnection from the natural world. She looks at science's limitations and instills in us an urgency to stay connected to the natural world by using familiar, rather than scientific, names. Taking us across the disciplines, Yoon reveals just how deep-seated the innate vision of life really is in all of us, and shows us how important it is to reclaim that vision, if we hope to save our world.

In this talk, Carol Kaesuk Yoon, half Japanese, half Korean, tells her personal story of becoming a journalist. Beginning with the pre-ordained life path of Ivy-League-College-then-Medical-School as determined by her parents, she describes how, en route, she fell in love with evolutionary biology, a fascinating science but one which was at times dauntingly dominated by white males. Eventually, on a lark, she discovers the diverse and dynamic world of newspaper writing, which led to nearly two decades of covering news about biology for The New York Times. A funny, relatable look at a fascinating life so far.