Saving the World, One Photon at a Time
LA SEÑORITA LIA WOOS TEENS TO SCIENCE

by Tim Stoddard (’01)


Lia’s Mission: To Shed Light on the Fun of Science.

She has the courage of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the quirky intelligence of Harry Potter’s friend Hermione Granger and a knack for gadgetry that the Spy Kids would envy. She’s Lia Cruise, a techno-savvy 14-year-old girl who navigates junior high with cool confidence, using her knowledge of science and engineering to bring mean kids to justice, enliven her wardrobe and ward off her annoying little brother.

Lia is the brainchild of Garland Waller, a COM assistant professor of film and television, and Leigh Hallisey, coordinator of marketing and communications at BU’s Photonics Center and a lecturer in television and popular culture at COM. Waller and Hallisey are working with colleagues at FableVision, a Boston-based media development firm, to market Lia through a television series, an interactive Web site, classroom materials and various retail products. “We developed Lia out of a concern that children, particularly young girls, unconsciously move away from science and math as they grow up,” says Waller. “We thought an interesting young girl, not a Barbie or a science nerd, would reach this audience.” That group includes some 14 million American girls between the ages of 8 and 12.

“We really need to give girls good role models,” Waller says. “We are sorely lacking — as a culture, as a community, as parents and as protectors of our children — in giving kids decent role models. And Lia is a good role model. She’s fun, but she’s a good kid. She likes school because she’s learning things, she’s putting the pieces of the puzzle together, and that’s fun.”

Lia’s name is an acronym for “light in action,” which reflects her keen interest in lasers, prisms, holograms and devices that use light to do things ranging from detecting counterfeit concert tickets to curing sores on her friend’s pet pig. Her clothing, hair accessories and jewelry interact with light in unusual ways. She wears a pair of color-changing jeans and totes a talking backpack. When she’s not writing in her online journal or IM-ing her friends at Marie Curie Junior High School, Lia does work for G.L.O., the Global Light Organization — a group of science-smart kids who solve light-based challenges around the world. Lia’s friend and mentor is Gloria Lumen, a brilliant science teacher who runs an art-studio/laboratory that’s filled with fiber optics, lasers, lenses and all kinds of light-based gadgets — many inspired by real-life technologies at the Photonics Center.

Lia is a Latina, though she was designed to appeal to girls of all races. “We felt that Lia needed to be Hispanic,” Hallisey says. “Latinos are the most underrepresented group in science and technology; they make up only 3 percent of the high-tech workforce, but if you look at the population in general their numbers are much, much higher. Also, if you look at representations of Hispanics on TV — they’re used for comedic effect or are in positions of servitude or, on law or cop dramas, they’re drug lords or gang members. You know, kids are watching this looking for a role model, asking ‘As a Hispanic 10-year-old girl, what can I grow up to be?’”

Lia is a unique personality, her creators say, and the Lia Project is a unique collaboration between a university and a media developer. In the late 1960s, the Children’s Television Workshop consulted with professors at Harvard to develop the educational content for the nascent Sesame Street, Waller says, “but it’s extraordinary in television to have an ongoing collaboration like this. To my knowledge, this has never been done before.”

Like Bill Nye the Science Guy, the Lia Project is in the so-called edutainment business, captivating young audiences with science and technology and inspiring kids to pursue careers in technical fields. But an underlying goal of the project is also to boost the number of women choosing careers in science and engineering in the United States, where only 9 percent of engineers and 27 percent of computer scientists are female. “Young girls don’t see any images of female engineers as they’re growing up,” says Hallisey. “They see Bill Nye, which is a quality education show, but in terms of role models, how many 8-year-old girls say they want to grow up to be a crazy professor with nutty hair working alone in a laboratory?”

A Pop Iconoclast

In the late 1990s, Waller, an award-winning producer of children’s television programs and documentaries, had the idea of creating a children’s show that would get girls interested in learning about science and technology through photonics, the study of the science of light. Waller worked with Caryl Rivers, COM journalism professor and gender-studies scholar, to develop the idea, then approached the BU Photonics Center, where she was put in touch with Hallisey. She knew immediately that in Hallisey she’d found the right partner for the job. “Leigh and I were just a firecracker team,” she says. “We spoke the same language. We got it.” Hallisey, whose graduate degree is in television and pop culture, concurs: “This is an amazing collaboration between Photonics and COM — this project involves business and entrepreneurship; it’s television and it’s popular culture; it’s media and it’s science and technology.”

The character of Lia came to life when Hallisey and Waller asked Peter Reynolds, founder and CEO of FableVision, to draw prototype sketches of their spunky heroine. Reynolds designed 16 different Lias. His twin brother, Paul Reynolds, president of FableVision and the newly emerging Lia team, field-tested the designs on elementary school kids, who helped refine Lia’s appearance and optimize her coolness.

The team then received a BU Provost’s Innovation Award in 2001 to develop a one-minute animated trailer introducing Lia and her posse of creative, hip and tech-savvy friends. Lia gathered further momentum with a grant from BU’s Community Technology Fund to develop a story bible for pitching the show to television networks.

Last June, BU and FableVision formed a company called the Lia Project, LLC. And now, her creators say, Lia is ready to take on the world. Last spring, the Lia Project secured its first licensing deal when the National Academy of Sciences announced Lia as the host of iwaswondering.org, the new companion Web site to its Women’s Adventures in Science book series.

Waller is taking a fall-semester sabbatical in order to devote herself full-time to the Lia Project, for which she is executive producer of the proposed television show — now in development with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Spin Entertainment, an animation and visual effects company based in Toronto — among other responsibilities. She and Hallisey have a variety of Lia projects at various stages of evolution. In addition to the TV show and Web site, they are working with FableVision to develop a package of educational software to be used in classrooms; a book series; and a museum-and-mall tour that will include hands-on experiments, a laser show, animation and music, holograms and kiosks describing Lia’s background and mission.

Lia’s Web site, www.liaonline.com, is up and running and will eventually serve as a venue for the “edu” part of the project’s edutainment. “Education in television is a dirty word,” says Waller. “If you’re going to create programming for kids, you can’t make it heavy lifting for them. The TV show is not going to hit you over the head with education or technology. It’s going to be something that makes you think, ‘This is a cool story — maybe I’ll go to the Web site and see just how she makes those things.’”

The Web site will also publish Lia’s Web ’zine and may host chat rooms for kids to discuss what they see on the show. It will offer opportunities to learn more about the Photonics Center and the College of Communication. And don’t be surprised if you start seeing Lia’s face on various products in department stores; her interest in light opens the door to many merchandising possibilities, Hallisey says, and the licensed products won’t diminish her educational impact. Sesame Street depends in large part on revenues from products such as Tickle Me Elmo dolls, which fuel the show’s educational enterprise. “We want Lia to be part of popular culture and in the kids’ minds all the time,” she says, “but the idea is to draw kids so that they are really interested in this technology.”

Tricia Brick contributed to this story.