Maia Weinstock is an American science writer and Lego enthusiast who resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Brown University in 1999,[1] and is the Deputy Editor of MIT News.[2][3]
Before working at MIT, she worked at BrainPOP,[4] and was an editor for SPACE.com and other science publications.[5]
In 2014, Weinstock was cited by Judith NewmanofThe New York Times as "a Wikipedian who has been instrumental in raising awareness" of the gender imbalance on that online encyclopedia; her article on how notability is determined on Wikipedia immediately provoked other Wikipedia editors to create a page about Newman.[4][6]
In addition to her editing work, Weinstock has been an editor of Wikipedia for a number of years, and has been involved in efforts to reduce the gender gap among editors and articles that occur on the site. This work includes working at edit-a-thonsonAda Lovelace Day, as well.[7]
A fan of Lego mini-figures, she first started building them for living scientists, the first being her friend Carolyn Porco.[7] Eventually, this included a submission to the Lego Ideas contest called the "Legal Justice League", which was designed to look like a courtroom built out of Lego bricks, and contained miniature versions of Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.[8] The submission was declined by LEGO as being too political, which led to an increase in publicity for the project, and eventually led to a submission with generic justices. A Boston Globe reporter described Weinstock's apartment as having "[s]tacks of heads and hairstyles, torsos and legs and arms, a pint-sized Frankenstein's workshop stored in little plastic bins".[9]
In March 2017, Lego announced that it would be making a "Women of NASA" set, based on a design Weinstock had submitted.[10]
In 2022 MIT Press published Weinstock's 320-page biography of Mildred Dresselhaus.[11][12]
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