The Null Hypothesis
OUR MISSION
At "The Null Hypothesis", we strive to create an open and supportive venue where researchers can share their work and science adventures with a wide variety of audiences in an informal and engaging way. We feel it is increasingly important to create a space to highlight what research looks like behind the scenes—human, often messy, and rarely straightforward. Science communication is a vital part of research, and we aim to provide a space for researchers to practice their science communication skills, and engage meaningfully with diverse audiences. Good science communication involves sharing research results, methods, and motivations, which then helps to facilitate discussions around science-related topics, promotes scientific literacy, and captures public interest in science. Our goal at the “Null Hypothesis” is to promote science communication by helping to demystify the scientific process, promote greater scientific literacy in public audiences, and create an open and safe space for researchers to share their stories. Ultimately, we aspire to celebrate the sometimes wonderful, sometimes painful, and occasionally hilariously unexpected undertaking that is research.
OUR TEAM
AKACIA PROPST
Co Editor-in-Chief
Akacia is a current PhD candidate at McMaster University. Her research looks at how we can take integrative, theoretically driven understandings of human health and apply it to how we structure bioarchaeological research and analyses. While new methods and new data can contribute a lot, it’s important that we make sure that we structure our analyses of data - old and new - in a way that reflects and captures the biological, social, and environmental mechanisms that influence peoples’ lived experience.
TAYLOR PEACOCK
Co Editor-in-Chief
Taylor is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her research studies how presentism and binary understandings of the past play out on human skeletal remains and how we can adopt more non-binary approaches to studying the past. She has an annoying large range of hobbies from bread baking and beer brewing to avid puzzling and watches far too much television for any sane person. Her interest in non-scientific research and research communication grew out of her previous experience as a historical researcher and writer for a tourist company, and her work on fandom studies in her undergraduate studies in British Columbia.
BRIANNE MORGAN
Co Editor-in-Chief
Brianne is a PhD student at McMaster University in the Department of Anthropology. She studies metabolic bone disease in archaeological remains, and is particularly interested in how multiple conditions can develop in the same person, and what that might look like. If there was a meme to describe her research, it would be the Old El Paso "why not both?" one. Her hobbies includes reading books, reading reviews about books, and thinking that other people's reviews of books are incorrect. She also likes board games, and playing fetch 24/7 with her dog, Nutmeg. Her interest in science communication and non-significant results comes from experience in trying to work with and share non-significant data herself, and from talking to countless other graduate students and researchers who mentioned having the exact same struggles.
ROWEN MONKS
Resident Artist/Graphic Designer
Rowen is a Marine Biologist based in Ucluelet, BC, Canada where she conducts coastal research and creates art. Rowen loves kelp. When she snorkels by, she loves the way kelp grazes her ankle with a kind of forwardness usually depicted at Friday night port town karaoke. Rowen has always been fond of abyssal spaces like the ones where kelp forests grow. This love arose from growing up as a wee pleb roaming the derelict streets of East Vancouver. She found peace in the unwavering, rhythmic swash of traffic, BC transit and industrial noise which remind her now of unending tides. The lightless nooks in East Hastings alleyways that harboured so much macro and microbial life, despite the inhospitable gloom, were a gateway of love to the not dissimilar hydrothermal vents in the great abyssal plains of the Pacific. She is beyond pleased to be part of the Null Hypothesis team as an illustrator and contributor. Her support for the Null Hypothesis stems from first-hand experience with the importance of building with each other through failures and successes as a collaborative scientific community.