Hi everyone! I am Yizhe, a multidisciplinary designer and science communicator. I founded Alchemy, a science communication program focused on science through visual storytelling, 3 years ago!

I was not very interested in science when I was young, but things changed when my good friend introduced me to cool chemistry experiments during my last year of junior high. Before high school, I always thought science and scientists were just pieces of information in the news, research centers, and textbooks. In high school, I excitedly navigated the ‘science nerd’ community for the first time. I met with scientists from Twitter, introducing their research, wrote emails back and forth with my chemistry pen-pal, sent messages to popular science writers complimenting their works. That’s when I realized that scientists are just everyday people interested in uncovering the beauty of the universe.

For a new Alchemy project, I decided to design a scientist profile picture maker to celebrate the visibility and diversity of people in STEAM (STEM+Art) fields. Currently, the visual media industry still portrays scientists in a stereotypical way. We get the movies about scientific researchers working on DNA and high-tech all day, the ‘mad scientists’ who work on crazy projects, etc. However, these portrayals show science careers in a way that’s not very related to our everyday lives. How can we get people, especially people of younger generations, to care about and be interested in science when there are no approachable role models?

The Scientist Maker contains cute accessories and daily clothes, as well as lab coats that remind you to wear your PPEs in the lab! You can be an astrophysicist, a scholar, a chemist, a biologist, a mathematician, a doctor, a paleontologist, an environmental scientist, and much more! The website is below. Here are some examples made with the Scientist Maker. Enjoy!

More info: picrew.me