Today's challenges, like environmental degradation, migration, and social division, don't fit neatly within the confines of a single discipline. In order to really address them, we have to cross diverse boundaries, pulling together wisdom from different times, geographies, and subject matters. For 30 years, the Royster Society of Fellows has embodied this spirit of crossing boundaries. It has encouraged and supported collaborations between the sciences and the humanities, despite their perceived differences. Being a Royster Fellow gave me the courage and permission to move between literacy, science, art, and computing; to create science storytelling projects that can bring communities together; to be bold in bringing them to people. It helped me explore how science doesn't only exist in isolation as lab experiments and data analysis but becomes richer when it's threaded into the bigger stories of our communities, history, and culture. This work is rarely easy. There are many roadblocks, and despite our best efforts, we may fall short of the difference we'd really like to make. We may not know how the last page will be written, but the strength of the Royster program lies in how it prepares us to dive in and embroider something for the future regardless.


Dr. Mejs Hasan is a science communicator on a mission to make Earth science feel human, warm, and accessible — using storytelling, animation, and data visualization to bring people of different backgroun ds together. As founder of Animations with Kids, she leads children through a collaborative process of co-creating science storytelling animations as a team, regardless of where they come from. To date, the program has produced 13 films with over 300 children across four cities and two countries and has secured more than $11,000 in funding. Her current work also includes building 3D visualizations of wartime destruction using open-source satellite data, transforming complex geospatial information into stories that anyone can understand and feel.

Before launching Animations with Kids, Mejs was an Earth Science Visual Storyteller at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she pioneered new techniques for creating more engaging 3D Earth data visuals, supported VIP visits with geospatial graphics and translation, and produced animations for the public. She has also written for WIRED Magazine, researched river and wetland health using satellite imagery — with a focus on the Chesapeake Bay and the Tigris/Euphrates river basin — and served as a media intern for EcoPeace in Amman, Jordan.

Mejs's work has been recognized with two Voyager Awards from JPL, an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship, and the grand prize in the inaugural AGU/NASA Data Visualization and Storytelling Student Competition. She has presented at AGU numerous times, including as an invited speaker, and has joined panel discussions for Crayola's Earth Day celebrations and NASA's STEM Career Day.

Mejs is a triple Tar Heel. She earned a B.A. in Economics (2006), an M.S. in Public Health with a concentration in Environmental Sciences and Engineering (2010), and a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences (2018). She was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship and a member of the Royster Society of Fellows from 2014-2018.

Mejs speaks on science storytelling, data visualization, and using creativity and collaboration to bridge divides between communities.