About Tom McFadden

I was born in Sacramento, California in 1986. At McClatchy High School I would exit my AP Biology classroom into hallways full of kids banging out pen beats on lockers, free-styling into voice recorders, and selling their mixtapes in the quad. The kids we looked up to looked up to Wu-Tang.

My love of biology and hip hop grew independently while I was at Stanford University. My three freshmen roommates and I were put together because we had all put Talib Kweli down as our favorite music. And as as my hip hop library expanded, I fell in love with the study of life, majoring in Human Biology.

I have never, to this day, taken myself seriously as a rapper (though almost every male I know from Sacramento has produced a rap album). But in the summer of 2008, Derrick Davis asked me to perform a rap about milkshakes for a talent show at Stanford Sierra Camp. I loved parodying songs and I loved performing live. Soon we turned the hyphy anthem “Tell me when to go” into a song about washing dishes with the Hobart machine – “Tell me when to throw.”

When I started working as a Course Associate for Stanford Human Biology in 2008, the parodies continued. Songs about rims (on cars) got flipped into songs about RIMs (reproductive isolating mechanisms). The students were shocked and excited, and the musical production values increased as I brought in more collaborators.

The past three years have taken me to East Palo Alto (California), Ixil (Mexico), and Dunedin (New Zealand) to help encourage young students to explore science through music. We’ve made songs about healthy eating, the water cycle, fire flies, and more.

Thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship, I was able to get a Master of Science Communication  from the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand. For my thesis I created the “Fossil Rock Anthem” music video and conducted education research into its impacts on learning and motivation.

I now live in the Bay Area, where I’ve been making science history rap music videos with middle schoolers (See “Brahe’s Battles“). I hope that teachers and students across the world will utilize, remix, and reinvent these videos while I teach 8th grade biology at The Nueva School next year.

-Tom McFadden