Maoya Bassiouni didn’t always know that she’d become a scientist.
“It kind of baffles me that this is what I’m doing now, and I’m not really sure how that happened,” she said.
Here, roughly, is how it happened.
Growing up, Bassiouni loved art. But it was more practical, she reasoned, to enter a field like engineering. She studied environmental sciences and engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, near where she grew up. There, she learned how to design sanitation systems and model streamflows. After her undergraduate degree, she worked for several Swiss-based nongovernmental organizations focusing on the intersection of humanitarian aid and nature-based climate solutions, including spending several months in Senegal.
What is one book, movie, or piece of media about your field you would recommend to young scientists?
Allan Miller’s documentary John Cage – I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It (1990).
I think it offers an accessible intro to John Cage’s work and ideas that have influenced my approach to art, science, and everyday life, especially the emphasis on embracing surprise and changing/expanding how we experience and interact with our environment, rather than focusing on learning and knowing.
She went on to become a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) for several years—the first time she came to the United States was for her position with USGS in Hawaii. (Having since lived in Oregon, Colorado, and northern California, she jokes that she’s “only been to wonderful places in the U.S.”)
Bassiouni found herself pulled to the world of research, so she returned to school to study water resources engineering at Oregon State University.
“That’s how I ended up getting a Ph.D. and exploring just questions for questions’ [sake] instead of questions for problems’ [sake],” she said. “I want to do something that people can actually concretely benefit from, but I also have this ideology that sometimes we don’t need to benefit from anything, and that’s actually very powerful to how we move through life.”
After earning her Ph.D., Bassiouni completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in Sweden and another postdoc at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Most recently, she worked as an assistant researcher at UC Berkeley, where her work blended ecosystem ecology, the study of land-atmosphere interactions, and data science.
“This idea of being curious and being surprised happens in art and happens in science.”
Beginning in 2024, she also directed a yearlong project called fluxART with funding from the National Science Foundation. fluxART paired scientists who study data from FLUXNET—a global network of eddy covariance towers that gather atmospheric data—with artists. The duos spent the year using FLUXNET data to create visual, musical, and immersive art pieces. As both an artist and a scientist, Bassiouni worked with artist Rosa Lewis to create a series of meditations and an animated mandala to encourage viewers to connect their own breath with the “breath of the biosphere.”
In addition to wanting to bring FLUXNET data to the public, Bassiouni saw fluxART as an opportunity to challenge scientists to interact with their own work in a new way. “I think it does change the way they reexperience or are reminded of how beautiful the data is,” she said. “This idea of being curious and being surprised happens in art and happens in science.”
—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Deputy Editor
This profile is part of a special series in our August 2026 issue on science careers.