Esther Ikoro

Esther Ikoro is a creative strategist, science communicator and producer with a Master of Public Health from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

She works with Discovery Education’s Mystery Science, where she answers the natural science questions students send in and walks them through curriculum-based lessons, and she appears on Minute Earth and on CBS’s Mission Unstoppable in her segment Nature Sidequest. Her channel, See You Outside, is about the plants, animals and phenomena most people never get close enough to notice, and in her series Wait, What?! — featuring the work of animator Moriz Oberberger — hand-drawn worlds explain scientific concepts that are too abstract, too small, too slow or too large to picture otherwise; the first five videos have drawn more than 700,000 views.

Her work also reaches into medicine, where she interviews doctors, patients and scientists for medical publications, covering new research, best practices, patient education and health advocacy.

As a 2023–2024 fellow of the John Templeton Foundation and PRX’s Big Questions Project, she co-developed Second Sunday, a podcast on faith through a queer Black lens that won the Signal Silver Award and three Black Podcasting Awards and drew attention from The Atlantic, Apple Podcasts and NPR.