Samia Bouzid

Philadelphia

Contributor at Freelance

Freelance audio storyteller & science writer

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Articles

Long after Her Tragic Death, We Follow in the Footsteps of the Dominican Republic’s First Female Doctor

2 weeks ago | scientificamerican.com | Laura Gomez |Laura Gómez |Lorena Galliot |Samia Bouzid

After Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo died in 1947, the Trujillo regime did its best to erase her legacy—while, at the same time, it appropriated her ideas. Yet those who had known and loved Rodríguez in San Pedro de Macorís, where she spent most of her life, kept her memory alive, sharing stories of her kindness and her work. After the assassination of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in 1961, Dominicans across the country started to recover her story.
Rebel Doctor Evangelina Rodríguez Improved Lives and Courted Controversy on her Return to the Dominican Republic

4 weeks ago | scientificamerican.com | Laura Gomez |Laura Gómez |Lorena Galliot |Samia Bouzid

Andrea Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, the Dominican Republic’s first female doctor, got a warm welcome on her return to the country from Paris in 1925. And she went straight to work, introducing her new ideas about health care for women and children. She set up a new medical practice and managed to get farmers to provide free milk for poor infants. But her proselytizing about contraception and her work with prostitutes made even her friends uncomfortable.
Helen Edwards Helped Create a Particle Smasher to Probe the Mysteries of Atoms

Aug 8, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Samia Bouzid |Katie Hafner |Laura Isensee

By the second half of the 20th century, physicists were on a mission to find the ultimate building blocks of the universe—what you get when you zoom in all the way to the tiniest bits that can’t be broken down anymore. They had a kind of treasure map, a theory describing what these building blocks are and where we might find them. But to actually find them, researchers needed to re-create the blistering-hot conditions of the early universe.
Elizabeth Bates and the Search for the Roots of Human Language

Apr 25, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Samia Bouzid |Katie Hafner

“We were each put on Earth to torment the other,” says cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in reference to Elizabeth Bates, a psychologist who challenged a prevailing theory about how humans acquire language. Bates believed that language emerges from interactions between our brain and our environments and that we do not have an innate language capacity. To many, that sounds like an innocuous statement.
The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses

Apr 4, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Samia Bouzid |Katie Hafner

It is December 1897 in England, and Annie Maunder, an amateur astronomer, is boarding a steamship bound for India. Her goal: to photograph a total solar eclipse. Like the many people in North America whose gaze will turn upward on April 8, Maunder was fascinated by the secrets of the sun and was determined to travel the globe and unlock them. She understood that the few minutes of darkness during a solar eclipse presented a special opportunity to explore the nature of the sun.
The Cognitive Neuroscientist Who Helped Unravel the Mysteries of Language

Mar 21, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Samia Bouzid |Katie Hafner

While working at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., the late cognitive neuroscientist Ursula Bellugi discovered that, much like spoken language, sign language was made up of specific building blocks whose assembly followed strict rules. Her subsequent discoveries about the complexities of sign language led to both linguistic breakthroughs and changes in the way deaf people felt about signing.
I found the soul of West Philadelphia in a purple sled | Opinion

Feb 11, 2024 | inquirer.com | Samia Bouzid

A few weeks ago, I awoke to the kind of quiet that could only mean one thing: After more than 700 days, Philadelphia’s snowless streak was over. That first snowy morning, I found myself in a group text of mostly unknown numbers. “Snow day!” the first text proclaimed. “Anybody want to go to Clark Park and play?”A few hours later, I set out with a 5-foot-long purple toboggan that’s at least 25 years old, a relic of my childhood snow days in Bucks County.
The Forgotten Star of Radio Astronomy

Feb 8, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Samia Bouzid |Carol Lewis

Australian physicist Ruby Payne-Scott helped lay the groundwork for a whole new kind of astronomy: radio astronomy. By scanning the skies for radio waves instead of the light waves that we can see with our eyes, Payne-Scott and her colleagues opened a new window into the universe and transformed the way we explore it. But to keep her job as a woman working for the Australian government in the 1940s, Payne-Scott had to keep a pretty big secret.