Written by Madison Brewer for Physics Today
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| Kirsten Banks is a physics graduate student at the University of New South Wales in Australia and creator of the popular TikTok account, @astrokirsten, on all things astrophysics. |
When the pandemic hit, Kirsten Banks missed speaking to audiences. A physics PhD student at the University of New South Wales in Australia, she was used to giving educational astronomy talks regularly at elementary and secondary schools and at public events. When those engagements were canceled, she turned to social media to continue her science outreach.
“I started doing science communication on social media by joining Twitter and making a Facebook page and an Instagram page,” Banks says. Then her partner introduced her to TikTok.
TikTok launched internationally in 2017. In contrast to Twitter, which features mostly written text, and Instagram, which consists primarily of images, TikTok users can post only short videos. If Twitter is like writing a pithy summary, TikTok is akin to giving a short, catchy talk with audiovisual aids. The platform is most popular with teenagers and young adults; in a survey conducted earlier this year, nearly half of US adults ages 18–29 reported using the service, compared with 22% of those 30–49 and 4% of people 65 and over.
Learn more about some of the fabulously creative #scientistsoftiktok by checking out: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20220105a/full/
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