Mika McKinnon
Co-Investigator and Public Engagement Lead for Project ESPRESSO
Disciplines: Geophysics, Science Communication, Geohazards
Degree/Major: BA Physics 2005 University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), MSc Geophysics 2010 University of British Columbia (UBC)
mika.mckinnon@gmail.com
Biography
Mika McKinnon is a geophysicist, disaster researcher, and science consultant in the entertainment industry. Along with her research into landslides on asteroids, she focuses on how clear science communication can lead to better disaster preparation, even if it takes more unusual formats like party planning to enhance community resilience or scrawling equations to establish plausibility for tv shows like Stargate and Star Trek. She's a science journalist whose writing appears in BBC, Wired, io9, Vice, Vox, and more.
Publications
Peer-reviewed: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MaMBsAoAAAAJ&hl=en
Popular media authored by me: https://muckrack.com/mikamckinnon
Related projects
Project ESPRESSO
Technical Description of Work
When exploring asteroids, comets, and small moons, the most important questions are where is interesting and where is safe? Project ESPRESSO is a multidisciplinary team creating a set of tools and equipment that can be added to robotic or human missions to help identify areas of scientific or economic interest, then assess the risks of those sites. McKinnon works on adapting landslide runout and rockfall terrestrial hazard assessment tools to the low-gravity and low- to no-atmosphere environments of small bodies.