Meet the Team

the Founder

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favorite science facts! 
400 years ago, 16,000 people had sex to (eventually) make you. This ancestor orgy could fill the Barclays center arena.
SARAH ROSE SISKIND
Founder
Sarah is a science comedy writer based in New York City. In addition to running Hello SciCom, she's executive-producing a science comedy TV show on PBS after shooting a physics comedy pilot with Sarah Silverman on NatGeo. Previously, she was lead writer for Neil deGrasse Tyson's Emmy-nominated TV show, StarTalk. She keynoted at SXSW Edu and performs stand-up mostly around NYC, mostly about psychedelics. She's written comedy for PBS, NatGeo, FOX, CBS, and the White House Press Correspondents Dinner. She was the lead comedy writer at Hanson Robotics for Sophia the Robot. She performed a birdcall on the Letterman show and wrote her Harvard thesis on comedy because what screams funny like 130 pages of MLA-formatted, academic text?

the Team

Canned foods were invented because Napoleon needed a better way to feed his troops while conquering Europe (Viva la Chef Boyardee!)
Andrew Moorehead
Senior Creative Lead
Andrew is a writer and performer based in New York City. Andrew’s specialties include social media content, narrative storytelling and writing dialogue, having recently completed his MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU. Previously Andrew wrote comedic board games for celebrities.
The oldest known graffiti
at Pompeii reads, “Gaius Pumidius Diphilus was here,” with a timestamp of October 3, 78 B.C.
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Willa Barnett
Creative Lead
Willa Barnett is a comedian, computer scientist, and trivia host from San Francisco, California. A recent graduate of Northwestern University, she now enjoys being exceptionally strange with her sketch group Skip Skip (@skipskipcomedy) on Instagram and TikTok. She is diving into the standup world at various mics in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Metaverse.
Placenta means "cake" in Latin.
Sarah Adelman
Creative Lead
Sarah Adelman is a native New Yorker, stand-up comedian, and trained as a reproductive health research scientist. She graduated Cum Laude from Dartmouth College and earned her Masters of Public Health from Columbia University in 2021, where she focused on maternal-child health disparities.  She's a regular at Stand Up NY, New York Comedy Club, Greenwich Village Comedy Club, and various independent shows, and can be seen on two episodes of HBO's Game Theory.
If the 2014 version of Godzilla was real, it would produce 12.9 million gallons of urine per day.
Hebba Gouda
Creative Lead
Hebba graduated from Carleton College, with a degree in physics (her thesis was about the physics of Titanic and Up). She writes for the scientific game show podcast Two What's?! and a Wow!, and for the humorous lifestyle website Let's Eat Cake. She honed her comedy chops at Second City and research abilities while working at Pause with Sam Jay on HBO.
If Earth were a basketball, the distance from Everest to the Mariana Trench would be a smaller bump than the ones already on the ball!
Mattheus Carpenter
Creative Operations Lead
Mattheus Carpenter is an NYC-based comedy writer and performer. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in the History of Science where he specialized in climate science, environmental policy, and agricultural history. He’s previously worked in climate tech, both on the investment and product development sides, as well as in fintech and academic research labs.
A lower jaw bone protrusion, also known as a chin, is entirely unique to Homo Sapiens. Not even our closest extinct relatives the Neanderthals nor Homo Erectus had chins.
Eli Ruffer
Creative and Admin
Eli is a former chemical engineer turned stand-up comedian and comedy writer based in NYC. He graduated from Carleton College with a degree in Chemistry where he spent an inordinate amount of time and energy injecting humor into supposedly serious papers and presentations. He tours nationally as a stand up comedian (Zanies, Laugh Factory, the Bell House), produces shows locally, and is a former contributor to the Onion.

Our Advisors

The average number of legs per person is about 1.97....so if you have two legs you have an above average number of legs.
Namir Khaliq
Development Advisor
Namir Khaliq is a writer and creative producer and the founder of Protostellar Media, a production company helping scientists play an active role in film and TV. Previously, he worked in feature film and scripted TV development at Imagine Entertainment (Ron Howard and Brian Grazer), the multi–Academy Award and Emmy–winning company, and in documentary development at Story Syndicate, founded by Academy Award–winning filmmakers Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan. He has also worked with Mosaic Media Group, Everyman Pictures, and Funny or Die.
Dolphins apparently use pufferfish to get high.
Dr. Sara K. Yeo
Science Advisor
Dr. Sara K. Yeo (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Utah. Her work on science and comedy has been published in Public Understanding of Science, among many other journals.  Dr. Yeo holds an M.S. in Oceanography (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) and her training in the life sciences has been invaluable to her research at the intersection of science, media, and society.
New York City sat at the edge of an ice sheet that buried most of North America until 18,000 years ago. Long Island is the pile of rubble it left behind.
Ted Barnett
Business Advisor
Ted Barnett has been starting companies since before some of this team's parents had email addresses. He co-founded When.com (acquired by AOL in 1999), worked at Apple during the Sculley era, and launched ventures in pen computing, online photos, and AI. He holds a Computer Engineering degree from Michigan and an MBA from Harvard, and — proving you're never too established to do something impractical — an MPS in Virtual Production from NYU. His current project, TimeWalk.org, uses AI and Unreal Engine to let people stroll through history.
The Hello SciCom team pointing at each other with silly fake mustaches on