My Environment: Helen Czerski

19 March 2026

The physicist, author and BBC presenter on sharing her enthusiasm for science and why communication is more difficult than we think

Helen Czerski, co-host of the BBC Radio environmental series Rare Earth, became a presenter by accident. The physicist was completing a postdoc in the United States when she was filmed talking about the bubbles in fizzy water as a way of explaining the behaviour of bubbles in the ocean. A few months after that video went up on YouTube, the BBC got in touch to say that they were looking for a new science presenter and asking her to audition. “TV people talk a lot, so I didn't really think much of it,” says Czerski. “I just turned up.”

She got the job, of course, and has gone on to present science documentaries on a wide range of topics for the BBC in the years since then, on everything from weather patterns to river health to the physics of sound. Czerski is also a prize-winning author, lauded for her popular science books Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life (2026) and Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes our World (2023). Alongside her writing and presenting work, Czerski is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London, specialising in the physics of breaking waves and bubbles at the ocean surface.

What’s the motivation behind your presenting work?

Thinking about ideas is fun, it is fun to play with the world. What's the point of being a physicist if you don't get to play with all the toys? I don't have children, but I suspect it's like those parents who decide that they'd like to go to the zoo and they say they're doing it for their children when really, it's because they want to go. And of course, they shouldn't need an excuse. Adults should be allowed to do all the fun things. I'm a great believer in that.

The other part is that finding a beautiful perspective on the world and then finding the best way to share it is very satisfying. I'm naturally enthusiastic about sharing. At my gymnastics club, when you were 16, you could become a junior coach, and that's the point where I discovered I could talk to groups of people. I was very shy; I couldn't talk to one person, but I could teach a group of kids how to do handstands.

Do you think about the impacts of your presenting work?

Having a wider understanding of science gives people agency. So much of operating in the world is about being able to ask the right questions that take you forward in knowledge. To do that, you need a framework for how the world works.

At the moment, we're seeing a huge shift in power towards whoever is controlling the chatbots; giving away agency to something that nobody understands, has no accountability and is completely opaque. Increasingly, online, we're seeing a lot of nonsense and if you can't be sceptical because you don't have the framework, then you're just helpless. If you don't even have the basics of how the world works, you are impoverished in your relationship with that world. We should be past the point where anyone's in that situation.

Your background is in physics and oceanography, yet you cover all sorts of other topics on Rare Earth – how is it being a generalist?

I've actually always been a generalist, because I was always very well read and interested in a lot of things and have always been very broad in the applications of physics. But I've also always been an environmentalist. When I was 13 years old, I set up an environment notice board in my secondary school, and then I was the environment officer at university.

I've talked about the environment more and more over the years, so Rare Earth feels like a really good fit. Because it's an hour-long programme, we’ve got the space to discuss the philosophy, history and culture associated with these topics, not just problem, solution, problem solution. It’s a great privilege and so much more interesting because of that.

In both your presenting work and your writing, you specialise in communicating complex scientific ideas to a lay audience – what’s the process there?

All of communication is fundamentally about prioritisation. There are 57 ideas on the table but if you frame the argument right, the rest of it makes sense. The world is a fascinating place – you can make anything interesting! I haven't got around to someone commissioning me to write a column on watching paint dry but I guarantee that it's interesting – it's just about finding the fun in it and why it matters, and then the story will tell itself.

One of the great myths is that communication is easy: talking is easy, so communication must be easy. And it's not, communication is really hard, even for someone like me who has spent 15 years professionally communicating science. I do my research and really think about what is the point of the thing that I want to write, and then I write it.

Helen Czerski deploying measuring devices on a Swedish expedition to the North Pole in 2018. Credit: Mario Hoppmann.

It's an interesting time to be doing this because the social media world wants more and more, quicker and quicker, and the number of clicks is the only thing that matters, not the quality. But if it's not done carefully, what's the point? You're just wasting everyone's time. I don't think there are shortcuts. Everyone thinks that these days you just get ChatGPT to write it. It’s very seductive because it looks like someone's done some thinking, but of course, no one has done any thinking, so it's worthless.

Your current academic work is around embedding sustainability in the mechanical engineering curriculum at UCL. What does that look like?

This is not a view of the world that pleases engineers and, of course, there are other perspectives – but if you look at our environmental problems, they almost all come from the fact that engineering education is all focused on making the problem manageable and then solving the thing in the middle. And the problem is that we live in a complex world that is very interconnected and is full of externalities. The challenge is to overcome that way of thinking and to connect engineers to other perspectives and the wider world. They don't have to be social scientists or experts on everything, but they do need to not be afraid to ask.

So the system that we are putting in place here is that, alongside the entire three or four-year curriculum, there's a virtual module of sustainability. It has various themes – energy, design, materials policy, critical thinking – which are introduced to students within other modules. The idea is that as they go through the years, they will build up a complete set of learning outcomes, but they are delivered as part of the modules, in a coherent way.

What it is, is that these are different perspectives on the problem, and they allow you to think more deeply, because there's a tendency with sustainability towards shallowness.

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Listen to Rare Earth on the BBC website, iPlayer or your favourite podcast app.

This article originally ran in the Autumn 2025 print issue of The Environment magazine. Become a member of CIWEM today to gain access to the quarterly magazine, as well as digital access (via MyCIWEM) going back to 2016. Non-members can also access the monthly The Environment digital newsletter.