Beth Johnson is the social media coordinator for the SETI Institute, where she shares not only the news, outreach, and photographs of the Institute’s work but curates a wide variety of astronomy, space, and planetary news from other sources. Additionally, she is a communication specialist for the Planetary Science Institute, splitting her time between social media and web content production. She was recently added to the hosting team for the Daily Space, CosmoQuest’s daily news show on Twitch and in podcast form.
Beth completed her undergraduate work at San Jose State University, earning a degree in physics with an emphasis in astrophysics. She worked on several research projects at the university, including looking for earthquake precursor signals in magnesium oxide and analyzing galactic evolution processes. She spent the summer of 2013 in an internship via CAMPARE (Cal Poly Pomona) at the SETI Institute, where she worked with Dr. Peter Jenniskens on NASA’s Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance project (CAMS). She analyzed the data for numerous meteor tracks and helped find several new meteor showers. She presented posters on her research at both winter and summer AAS conferences in 2014.
In her personal life, Beth is the wife of a Canadian network engineer/hockey player, the mother of a genderfluid teenager, and the guardian of five cats. She is passionate about science communication and education and can be found on many social media sites as planetarypan. She volunteers for several astronomy organizations, including a local astronomy group and an online astrophotography group, assisting them with social media and outreach. She has ambitions to one day add the title of “Doctor” to her moniker.