31 Mar 2016
Mayim Bialik (pictured with Jim Parsons) Image: Getty Images
Not only does Mayim Bialik play neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler on TV, but The Big Bang Theory star is one in real life. She holds a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA, so she’s happy that her character and that of Bernadette (Melissa Rauch) are role models for young girls.
“They’re both scientists and they’re different kinds of scientists,” Bialik told Parade.com. “Amy Farrah Fowler is much more conservative and kind of frumpy, and Bernadette wears cute headbands and gets more time in the makeup chair than I do. She’s a person who works in a professional commerce-science community, but she also does research and she wears a lab coat and all that good stuff.”
Now, Bialik is going to put her degree to good use as part of a new initiative to get young women involved in the worlds of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) as part of FabLab, a series which airs on FOX stations nationwide. Bialik will host an “Ask Mayim” segment, which will allow the audience an interactive experience in which Bialik will answers questions from viewers.
As for why the former Blossom star, who is the mother of two sons wants to get involved, the answer is simple.
She says, “Historically, women have been underrepresented in a lot of fields, and a lot of that was culturally what was going on because women weren’t really in the work force as much. That’s obviously shifting, thankfully, and there’s obviously a disproportionate representation of women in the STEM field, and I, definitely, think that there’s so much of the female perspective to offer of these fields. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what that even entails, so I think this show’s going to really broaden the perspective for girls.”
Bialik was not raised as a math/science person. Rather, when she was onBlossom — from ages 14 to 19 — she had different tutors for each subject, and got turned on to science when her biology tutor was “amazing.”
“She was, at that time, a dental student at UCLA; she must have been about 20, and I was 15, and it was the first time I had a one-on-one tutoring situation; especially with a female, so she was my first role model at that point in my life. She was incredibly passionate about science in a way that I thought you could only be passionate about literature or art, or the things that my parents were passionate about, and that was my first belief that I could have the passion to be a scientist, and that she could give me the skill set.”
Now that March Madness is behind us, The Big Bang Theory returns with a new episode tonight in which Amy is shocked at a revelation from Sheldon (Jim Parsons) after she buys him a new laptop, so we got her to answer some questions about TV’s No. 1 comedy as well:
They do; they have a physics consultant – his name is Dr. David Saltzberg, who is a physics professor at UCLA. A lot of our writers have science backgrounds or science-associated backgrounds, but a lot of times we have to fudge things for visual effect. For example, if I’m doing brain slicing in a scene in Amy’s lab, technically they’d be sliced so thin you couldn’t see them, so we often have thicker slices than they should be. But in general, all the stuff on the white boards is correct, and all the stuff in the offices and things like that are correct.
How Amy has changed since joining the cast?
I think that the writers have been able to expand a lot more, explore all the different combinations of the relationships between Amy and all the other characters as we all interact with each other in new ways. Amy’s become a lot more comfortable. I think the relationship with Sheldon has been really good for both of their characters.