Comic book chemistry

Writing her PhD thesis brought a sudden and upsetting realisation to Veronica Berns. Many of the people she wanted to share her research with wouldn’t be able to understand it. Her thesis focused on how solid materials pack together at the atomic level, a phenomenon that is difficult to predict. PhD theses like these can be uninviting and exclusionary to non-scientists and ‘while scientifically accurate, [they don’t] capture the excitement of discovery,’ says Berns. So, she created a comic, Atomic Size Matters.