Desiré Whitmore, aka LASERchick, is a senior physics educator at
Exploratorium, a public hands-on learning laboratory in San Francisco where she leads curriculum development workshops for middle and high school teachers. She is also a science trainer at
Amplify Science, where she crafted a digital science curriculum for grades K through 8.
Whitmore has more than a decade of research experience as a laser spectroscopist. Her Ph.D. research focused on the development of very fast laser systems to study the vibrations of single molecules, electrons traveling across the surface of metals, and the fluorescence of semiconducting quantum dots. She did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, where she designed attosecond lasers, the fastest lasers that emit X-ray light.