The Raw Science “Lisa Dettloff Passion For Inquiry” Prize

In 2019, our world lost one of the great science educators of our time, Lisa Dettloff.

Without teachers and learners, there could be no science. Lisa would be humbly honored to have the Lisa Dettloff Passion for Inquiry Prize of the Raw Science Film Festival given in her name. We thank her husband, John Larsen, for allowing us to do so. Dettloff’s desire to ‘understand all things’ powered her capacity to elevate the quality of science education for children and their teachers. She invigorated her students by establishing settings where they could soar on the wings of knowledge toward unraveling the mysteries of the universe.

Lisa Dettloff entered UC Berkeley at age fifteen to study physics. At seventeen, she was hired to teach at the Lawrence Hall of Science, a science education research center at the University of California, Berkeley. Her twenty-one year career at Lawrence Hall added richness and depth to her exploration of inquiry-based science education [1]. She developed curricula presenting large and small science workshops which incubated other educator’s and children’s understanding of how things work—and equally as significant—how things might work better.

Passionately embracing adventure and challenge, Lisa Dettloff taught worldwide for six months each year in settings including international schools in capital cities, small village school houses, and schools for street children in Guatemala and Nepal. She also spent six years as a Science Specialist for the Nueva School, an independent school for gifted children, where she gestated a new generation science education program. Understanding that knowledge protects life, she was a presenter for AL Gore’s Climate Education Project and consulted for Microsoft’s Next Media Research.

An avid dancer in many formats—looking every aspect of the world straight in the eye— Lisa Dettiloff journaled and documented the course of her wild type IDH1 Anaplastic Astrocytoma [2] so that others might better comprehend neuroplasticity and its fragility. A teacher beyond the end, Lisa understood “There is no end in nature, every ending is a beginning.[3]”

September Williams, MD,

Author, Bioethicist and Filmmaker,

Raw Science Film Festival Judge

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1 http://passionforinquiry.com

2https://brainexplorations.blog

3 Emerson, Ralph,W. “Circles’