Stories of Science was founded by Dr. Lisa Cantrell, the leading consultant and data story coach for the organization. She received her PhD from Indiana University in 2013 in Psychology where she conducted research on language and numerical perception in infants, children, and adults. She then went on to complete a post-doc at the University of California, Davis where she used eyetracking methods to study infant attention and memory. At the same time, she became deeply interested in storytelling and how to talk about science with the public in ways that were engaging and understandable. Her love of science communication led her to science journalism. During 2015-2018, she worked as a freelance science journalist, producing stories for NPR as well as her own science podcast, An InExact Science which was featured in Science Magazine. She then began taking some of these same storytelling principles back to her own research and "academic" world, infusing components of story into her own presentations and written work.

Dr. Cantrell began her position as a professor at Sacramento State University in 2017. That same year she founded Capital Storytelling-- a non profit with the mission of training individuals to tell their true stories to empower and drive social change. However, her first love is data storytelling and using narrative components to make science more engaging, compelling, and understandable. She founded Stories of Science in 2022 and offers coaching and customized workshops to scientists, universities, and other research institutions. You can download a copy of her academic CV here or find out more about her storytelling work on her personal website.