STEM

Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D. served as the Science Advisor for several television series and movies, including SyFy Channel series "Defiance," the TNT series "Falling Skies," and the film "Gravity." He performed the same role for four seasons on the Peabody Award winning "Battlestar Galactica", as well "Eureka", "Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome", and "The Event". He also produced the award-winning short "D.N.E.: Do Not Erase." Grazier co-authored the "Hollyweird Science" series of books, as well as "The Science of Battlestar Galactica", and was an editor and contributing author for the American Chemical Society anthology "Hollywood Chemistry: When Science Met Entertainment". Grazier was a research scientist and science planning engineer for 15 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on the Cassini/Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan. He was the Investigation Scientist for the Imaging Science Subsystem instrument, and wrote mission planning and analysis software that won both JPL- and NASA-wide awards. Still an active researcher, his research areas include numerical method development, and long-term large-scale computer simulations of Solar System dynamics, evolution, and chaos. Dr. Grazier is also active in bringing the wonders of science and space to the public. He teaches classes in basic astronomy, planetary science, cosmology, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the science of science fiction at UCLA and Santa Monica College. He has appeared on several episodes of History Channel's "The Universe," Science Channel's "Alien Encounters," and National Geographic's "Naked Science".