As the short-form video platform TikTok surged in popularity during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Julia Bauman saw an opportunity to rethink how science could reach people where they already were—scrolling on their phones. Now a PhD student at Stanford University in geneticist Lars Steinmetz’s lab, Bauman’s path includes conducting scientific research and sharing the latest biotechnology advances with her online followers.
From Genomics Research and Tool Development to Science TikTok
Julia Bauman records videos on different scientific papers, disseminating complex topics into engaging content in roughly 60 seconds.
Julia Bauman
The allure of genetics caught her attention in high school. As an undergraduate student at the University of Washington, she studied neurobiology with the initial goal of pursuing a pre-med track. That trajectory began to shift when she contributed to a study on Alzheimer’s disease that connected neuroscience and genetics, drawing her toward research.
Motivated by this experience, Bauman went on to work at the Broad Institute in James Neal’s group, where her interest in genomics deepened. “This kind of solidified me being especially interested in this niche of genomics that is tool development and method development,” she said. One of her projects focused on using optical barcode imaging as a readout for CRISPR perturbations in cells.
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, lab shutdowns brought her research to a halt, leaving her feeling stuck. Watching press conferences during that time, she noticed a gap in accessible science communication. “There wasn't a lot of good science communication resources for people,” she remarked. While podcasts and long-form blog posts emerged, she felt that they mainly reached audiences already seeking out scientific information. Driven by a sense of responsibility, she felt a growing need to contribute: “I do science. I should be able to help with this.”
While some people spent hours perfecting their sourdough bread, others spent hours scrolling through online videos on platforms like TikTok. Bauman saw an opportunity to bridge these trends. “[Let’s] meet people where they're at, which is scrolling TikTok, and give them some high-quality, information-dense content that is also engaging.”
Out of this idea, 60 Second Science was born.
Explore Science Topics in 60 Seconds
As a one-woman operation, Bauman began by creating videos on her phone. Initially, she made content related to the pandemic such as describing how COVID-19 tests worked, how mRNA vaccines work, and innovations about the newest generation of vaccines.
Over time, her content expanded beyond the pandemic. She began summarizing research papers on topics like CRISPR, gene editing, and genomics. “I really enjoyed doing this format because it forced me to go read more literature. It’s not necessarily in my field, but it’s usually pretty adjacent, like synthetic biology or therapeutics,” explained Bauman. For her, these videos are a win-win: They push her to learn new material while also making that knowledge accessible to a broader audience—from fellow students to industry professionals, including those in venture capital.
“I always try to make the videos such that they could be understood by anybody with a high school level biology understanding, but hopefully it’s still interesting to somebody with a PhD level understanding.”
The storytelling skills she’s developed through video-making have also strengthened her scientific work. Crafting concise, engaging explanations has “really helped solidify…a general structure of a story that works well and makes sense” for her professional science, whether she’s writing papers or presenting at conferences.
Her posting cadence has varied as she balances content creation with the demands of her PhD, ranging from weekly uploads to monthly posts. She is also part of a fellowship program focused on developing science communication skills, which has encouraged her to branch into topics beyond biology, including physics and chemistry.
Since she created her TikTok account in 2020, she has amassed more than 33,000 followers. More recently, Julia also posts her content on YouTube to expand her reach and play around with longer content formats. These can range from one minute to six minutes. To support this work, she collaborates with other students to help identify papers, create visuals, and build out summaries.
As she continues producing content while finishing her PhD, Bauman hopes her future career will combine both of her passions, which she described as, “doing great science and also communicating it.”