Wired.com presents the Geek's guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 318 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Emily Calendrelli.

She's a correspondent on the Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World and an executive producer

and host of Fox's Exploration Outer Space.

She holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering

from West Virginia University and to master's from MIT and aeronautics and

astronauts as well as technology and policy. And we'll be speaking with her today about her children's book Ada Lace on

the case and its sequels which aim to get girls interested in science.

And now here's our interview with Emily Calendrelli.

All right so we're here with Emily Calendrelli.

All right, so we're here with Emily Calendrelli. Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Okay, so in the acknowledgments for Ada Lace on the case, you say,

I wish I had someone like Ada to look up to when I was younger

So could you just talk about why you feel like there was something missing in terms of characters like this when you were growing up?

Yeah, so when I was growing up, I wasn't a kid who really thought that science and

tech and engineering and all that stuff was for me, and I'm sure that's for a number of reasons, but one of them is I think that a lot of the books that I read, if they had any science or really any adventure in general that I liked, any books that I liked, all of the

main characters were boys, right? And so that didn't stop me from reading those books, but it did I think prevent me from reading those books but it did I think prevent me from seeing myself

as someone who could become that main character and have those types of

sciencey experiments or adventures or whatever. and have those types of science,

experiments or adventures or whatever it was that was happening in the book. And so what I wanted to do was create a character that was female

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