Hi! ^.^

My name is Danbee (단비), which in Korean means (literally) “sweet rain” and (idiomatically) “rain that comes at just the right moment”.

I’m a queer Korean-American field neuroscientist, storyteller, dancer, and dreamer who spends a lot of time thinking about anatomy, movement, empowerment, community building, re-indigenisation, diasporas, and the ocean. I love being in the wilderness, especially in the mountains and by the sea.

I love exploring and strengthening connections across many different topics, as a way to collaborate and share insights. I especially enjoy crafting multi-sensory interactive experiences, and my heart’s work is nurturing and stewarding intergenerational communities for collective, free-choice learning.

My passion for this work began when I participated in Terrascope, a freshman seminar course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I continued my participation in Terrascope, first as an Undergraduate Teaching Fellow, then to this day as an Alumni Mentor. I also spent almost 15 years singing, dancing, acting, directing, designing costumes and props, writing, and more for the MIT Musical Theater Guild – another intergenerational community of friends, drawn together by a shared love of creating ambitiously nerdy musicals.

Another long-term community dear to me is the Appalachian Institute for Creative Learning(AICL), a summer enrichment camp for rising 3rd through 12th graders established in 1981 in the southern Appalachia region of the US. When I started teaching there in 2010, I had no idea how much I would learn and grow with this incredible community. After giving my time and energies in a variety of additional roles, including as a member of the Board of Directors, I’m honoured and proud of how much benevolent change I’ve witnessed in a part of the world carrying such a heavy heritage of oppression.

Teaching at AICL got me confident enough to try spinning up learning communities in contexts further from home. In 2018 I co-founded Neuronautas, a summer intensive field neuroscience program for teenagers in the Lisbon and Oeiras, Portugal. In 2022, I helped organise and teach Neuronauts UK, a sister program with very similar content and structure as Neuronautas. In 2023, Neuronautas (Portugal) successfully ran our first Junior TA program, in which alumni of the program could come back as junior members of the teaching staff.

I’m now eager to create learning communities that meet up more often than a few weeks every year. I’m currently a co-director at Pulse & Pickle, a community hub and creative global kitchen in North London, committed to gathering with local residents to collectively grow, cook, and eat sustainable, accessible vegan food.

My dream futures are full of communities like Terrascope, AICL, Neuronautas, and Pulse & Pickle – radical, joyful villages of creative and cooperative people passionate about lifelong learning and mutual benefit. I want to give my energies to build those futures by building bridges between modern neuroscience and indigenous wisdom.

If any of this sounds fun or interesting to you, I’d love to chat.

Curriculum Vitae

Other fun things I’ve done:

• Co-wrote and choreographed an original musical called Hack, Punt, Tool. You can watch the 2017 production on YouTube;

• Created an interactive aquarium exhibit that collected neuroscience data from over 24,000 visitors;

• Self-published a YA sci-fi graphic novel called The First VIRS.