What Do People Do at the Science Museum? @Central

w/ Author Maggie Tokuda-Hall and UCPM Scientists!

Celebrate Maggie Tokuda-Hall's new book about science museums and the folks who run them, along with UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology scientists!

Author Maggie Tokuda-Hall will be here to celebrate her new book What Do People Do at the Science Museum? and joined by Sr. Museum Scientists Alex Lowe (Paleobotany Collections) and Ashley Dineen (Invertebrates)!

Saturday, October 24

11:30am-12:30pm

Central 4th Floor Children's Nonfiction Room

2090 Kittredge St.

Berkeley, CA 94704

About the Book:

A fun, vibrantly illustrated behind-the-scenes tour of the inner workings of a natural history museum and all the incredible people who work there!

Welcome to the Science and Natural History Museum! Here you’ll see all kinds of cool things, from a whole Dunkleosteus skeleton to a tiny dwarf seahorse to a glimpse of the Andromeda Galaxy. You’ll also meet all kinds of cool people—like volcanologists, paleontologists, squid biologists, and many more—who research fascinating questions so that they can answer yours.

But what do these people do all day at the science museum?

Well, there’s only one way to find out! Join a field trip through the busy museum and find out about all the kinds of scientists who work there and each of their incredible fields.

About the Creators:

Maggie Tokuda-Hall is not a scientist, but she does have a lot of questions. She grew up going to the Lawrence Hall of Science, the La Brea Tar Pits, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the Steinhart Aquarium, and the Los Angeles and Oakland Zoos. Once, when she was 12, she even got to visit the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan in Japan. Nowadays, she takes her two kids to the California Academy of Sciences. She lives in Oakland, California, with her family and her objectively perfect dog. Learn more about Maggie at prettyokmaggie.com.

Qin Leng is a visual development artist and an illustrator and author of children’s books. Throughout her career, she has illustrated picture books, magazines, and book covers for publishers around the world. Clover/Trèfle, written by Nadine Robert, was the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for best picture book, and Piper Chen Sings, written by Phillipa Soo and Maris Pasquale Doran, was an instant New York Times bestseller and received three starred reviews. Qin lives in Toronto with her husband and her son. Learn more about her at qinillustrations.com.

About the Scientists: 

Alex Lowe's research interests are in paleoecology, paleoclimate, geochronology, taxonomy, and biogeography. He works primarily with Cenozoic plant macrofossils and recent research has focused on reconstructing terrestrial vegetation and climate in the western US, particularly the Pacific Northwest, during the late Paleogene and Neogene. These rich fossil records provide an exciting opportunity to reconstruct the response of vegetation fairly analogous to modern wet temperate forests of the eastern US, Europe, and east Asia to global climatic changes and pervasive regional volcanism. He was a Peter Buck Deep Time Post-doctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in 2025. 

Ashley Dineen earned her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Geosciences from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and completed postdoctoral work at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Her research is focused on paleocommunity structure and functional diversity dynamics during and after massive environmental disturbance (e.g. climate regime transitions, mass extinction), which involves quantifying the food web structure and trait space dynamics of marine paleocommunities. Her fieldwork localities include China, Italy, Argentina, and several states in the Western US. She was the Paleontological Society's Cordilleran Section Chair from 2020-2024 before becoming Chair of the Collections Committee in 2025.

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