A fan of ripped jeans and baseball caps, Tracy Fanara admits most don’t peg her for a scientist.
But myths are meant to be busted, or so she has learned.
Fanara, a triple-degree Gator alumna, is hoping to become the Science Channel’s next TV-show host, facing off against nine others on “MythBusters: The Search.” The competition’s first episode aired Monday.
“Just being in a position to inspire people to take interest in science is really important to me,” she said.
She was chosen for the show, in which popular myths are scientifically — and sometimes dramatically — tested, after Science Channel producers watched a YouTube video she made for her dissertation about storm-water runoff. Someone — Fanara doesn’t know who — sent the video to the producers in July, and they immediately contacted her. Three weeks later, she was on her way to San Francisco to start filming the show, the 32-year-old said.
“I was really scared and excited at the same time,” she said.
Fanara received a bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree from UF, all in environmental engineering. Currently, she works at Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, but still lives in Gainesville with her husband.
Before she was contacted, Fanara said she rarely watched the show. In order to make up for lost time, she binge-watched as many episodes as she could on YouTube and On Demand.
During the first episode, she and the other contestants caught footballs to test “Deflategate,” referring to Tom Brady’s football-deflation scandal in the 2015 NFL playoffs.
Afterward, contestants were divided into teams to test if they could eject a passenger out of a car without using explosives. Her team completed the challenge successfully.
What viewers saw on TV was nothing compared to her team’s hard work, she said.
Fanara wanted to show that there is no stereotype for being intelligent.
She especially wants to prove that women, no matter their age, can be engineers.
When Fanara told her former professor, David Mazyck, about her TV spot, he wasn’t surprised at all.
The UF environmental engineering professor said he would never forget the day she pulled out a speaker after her presentation on water treatment and began to rap about carbon to a 60-person class.
A decade later, it’s still a running joke between the two of them. Mazyck said he threatened to rap at Fanara’s Ph.D. defense but decided the other committee members wouldn’t like it.
He said he knew she was going to do something big after graduating.
“She’s really good at thinking outside of the box,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all for her to pick up a welder and put something together.”
Tracy Fanara, a 32-year-old UF alumna, sits on top of her team’s car in the first episode of the Science Channel’s new show “MythBusters: The Search.” She is one of 10 contestants on the show.
