Namir Khaliq works with scientists and organizations to tell stories about their work. Namir drew upon his years of working in Hollywood when he founded Protostellar Media, a production company that helps scientists establish themselves as part of the creative process for film and television. We are thrilled to have him join Hello SciCom as our Development Advisor (after Sarah Rose Siskind gradually courted him over many games of Bridge).
Our Senior Lead Creative Andrew Moorhead sat down with Namir to talk about his background in both entertainment and science, the brilliance of The Good Place, and the importance of embracing complexity and nuance when talking about science.
Andrew: What got you interested in combining science and storytelling?
Namir: I’ve always seen storytelling as a means to an end. That end is conveying ideas that are otherwise difficult to connect with in a didactic way. Storytelling is one of the oldest human traditions, one of the oldest ways we’ve understood the world, the universe, and our place in it. My interest in storytelling came from consuming stories that taught me about the wider world when I was a kid. I came to see storytelling as a vehicle for ideas, and ultimately I think science is the best thing we have for understanding not just how the universe works, but how we as humans should navigate it.
Andrew: Was there a particular story that’s had an especially profound impact on the way you view the power of stories?
Namir: The one that really clarified this for me was The Good Place: essentially a moral philosophy 101 course turned into a broadcast sitcom. Each episode was funny and had its own plotline, but the show was structured around helping people understand how to be a good person, while grappling with all the thorniness and complexity of that question in a bright, entertaining way. For me, it showed that the stories and media people already enjoy can be reworked to teach and communicate some of the most complicated questions we face as a species.
Andrew: Looking at the other side of the science storytelling coin, talk to me about your history and relationship with science.
Namir: I loved science from a very young age. I always saw the world through a scientific, rational, objective perspective and wanted to understand the cause and effect of things. At the same time, I’m a huge generalist. I like thinking in varied ways, and that probably kept me from becoming a scientist, where so much depends on specializing in very narrow subfields. You could spend your life studying a single gene and still have more to learn. I knew I didn’t have the patience for that, so my current job lets me stay broad and flex my creative muscles while still indulging in science.
Andrew: I grew up in a generation that was influenced by edutainment like Bill Nye, The Magic School Bus, and NOVA. Who were the science storytellers that really influenced you?
Namir: I think it’s a combination of two things I grew up with. One was just great filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Aaron Sorkin, Rajkumar Hirani, and Steven Spielberg, who could teach you something with their movies. On the science side, the people I really learned science from were YouTube creators I watched as a kid who focused on science, people like the Green brothers, Derek Muller of Veritasium, the Vsauce YouTube channel, animated studios like Kurzgesagt that were making videos about the universe in fun, short form ways, but that were also really proving that you could talk about science in a way that was visually stimulating and even sometimes had a narrative to it. And so I guess I wanted to combine those two pieces into one: the cinematic side and the pop-science side.
Andrew: Talk to me more about your experience in the entertainment industry. How did those experiences prepare you for a career in science storytelling?
Namir: My early career was in Hollywood, helping to produce films for major studios and for directors like Ron Howard, Judd Apatow, and Jay Roach, including projects for Netflix, Amazon, and other big players. Those experiences shape how I think about science storytelling: how we can retool the world’s biggest cultural medium, and use it as a carrier for science. Films are so difficult to get made – 1 out of every 100 movies developed are actually produced – but hard things are hard for a reason, and I’m drawn to the challenge of taking big bets and using popular media to communicate science as widely as possible.
I was working at a big Hollywood production company when I entered the field of science storytelling. People from the entertainment world almost never reach out to people from the scientific world. What made those early collaborations work was being able to speak enough of scientists’ language that they felt understood and respected. There was a real connection in realizing I wasn’t just coming from Hollywood; I had some grasp of how they think and work. That shared language was essential. Without it, collaboration doesn’t go very far. It came partly from lifelong curiosity, and partly from doing the homework needed to meet people where they are.
Andrew: Is there a science storytelling project that you’re particularly proud of?
Namir: The projects I’m most proud of usually come from a simple principle: use genres people already love to communicate science. For example, I thought about one popular genre, the romantic comedy, and asked how we could use that format to teach something about the science of love. That led us to Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist who was arguably the world’s foremost expert on the subject. Before she sadly passed away in 2024, we worked with her for a year and a half to develop a screenplay inspired by her life and work. The film will explore what happens in the brain when we fall in love or experience heartbreak, while also following the people she studied, as well as the twists and turns of her own love life. I think that’s one example of using film to make deeply human science accessible, emotional, and widely relatable.
Andrew: This is an unplanned bonus question, but do you have a dream actor for the role of Helen Fisher?
Namir: Yes, but I can’t tell you…
–Five seconds later–
Namir: … It’s [Name Redacted].
Andrew: Oh, she’s incredible!
Namir: Yeah, she’s great.
Andrew: We talk a lot at Hello SciCom about our “Principles of Science Comedy.” What is one of your principles of science storytelling?
Namir: I think the biggest thing is knowing what matters to a general audience and what can be stripped away. For me, that often means removing jargon: the names of molecules, the details of how they interact, the variables in a physics equation. Those inputs usually aren’t what matters most. What matters are the implications: how science affects people, their place in the world, and how they relate to others and the universe. The key is to preserve the important chain of cause and effect while focusing on the qualitative ideas that find people where they are, without bogging people down in technical language or details that aren’t relevant to their lives.
And it's really easy to underestimate how hard that is. So it's not something that happens automatically, and like all good science, it's a process of trial and error. But hopefully you can find that place where you're conveying just enough information that the audience is going to learn something new without making them feel like they're in a class they don't want to be in.
Andrew: In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing scientists, or the field of science, today, and how is your storytelling hoping to address those challenges?
Namir: As an outsider (not a scientist), it seems to me that science has become so complex that what remains to be solved are often the most nuanced, contested, and hard questions for the public to follow. Scientists understand that disagreement is part of the process, but to many people, it can look like science doesn’t know what it’s doing. I think the fundamental misunderstanding that's suffused the general public is that science is supposed to be black-and-white. But it's never operated that way, and it certainly doesn't today. And so I think there's a place for storytelling to rectify that misunderstanding: by embracing the complexity and translating it into forms that make the process, the nuance, and the value of science more apparent. The best science stories show science as a process, as opposed to a moment.
Andrew: Any last words of sage advice you’d like to impart on our hungry Hello SciCom audience?
Namir: I think there are many ways to tell a story about science. One is to make a big Hollywood movie, but another is to think about your own favorite fact of science and find a fun way to communicate it to your friends who may not otherwise be interested in it. That's a more grassroots, reliable way to get science out there. I think the more people we can get thinking in scientific terms, the better. And it's a process that anyone can engage with.
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And on that note, for a fun science fact, check out Namir’s profile on our team page!
And please get in touch with us for a free consultation if this spotlight inspires any ideas!
