Let’s Talk About That

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Shamim Sarif, award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and director, about the power of storytelling to illuminate identity, love, and belonging.

Shamim grew up in London in an Indian Muslim family with deep roots in South Africa, and from an early age saw the world through stories. As she came to understand her own identity, she found herself drawn to writing the kinds of queer and cross-cultural stories she rarely saw represented on screen or in books.

The conversation traces her journey from novelist to filmmaker, including I Can’t Think Straight, The World Unseen, Despite the Falling Snow, and Polarized. Shamim reflects on navigating family and cultural expectations, building a life with her wife and creative partner Hanan Kattan, who is Palestinian, and discovering that stories she wrote because they were important to her could have profound meaning for people who had rarely seen themselves represented. Shamim tells deeply human stories that draw on her lived experience as an LGBTQ+ artist and is a voice we all need to hear.

Film, book, and television credits at https://www.shamimsarif.com/

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Mariam Khayretdinova, - neuroscientist, data scientist, founder of Brainify.AI, and author of ‘Decoding Despair: How AI Is Reshaping Psychiatry’ - about rethinking how we understand and treat depression—one of the most widespread and complex illnesses of our time.

Mariam’s journey into mental health began with her own lived experience. Growing up with undiagnosed depression in a culture where mental illness was stigmatized and poorly understood, she spent years navigating symptoms without a framework for what she was experiencing or how to seek help.

That experience now informs her work at the intersection of neuroscience, data science, and artificial intelligence. In the conversation, Mariam explains why psychiatry still relies heavily on subjective, symptom-based diagnoses, and why current treatments often follow a trial-and-error approach that can take months—or years—to find something that works.

She outlines a new vision: using large-scale biological, behavioral, and digital data to uncover objective biomarkers of mental illness and move toward truly personalized care. From EEG-based models to AI-driven early detection tools, Mariam explores how advances in data and computation could transform psychiatry into a more precise and predictive discipline, leading to better outcomes for patients.

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Stanford Professor Aaron Roodman, about some of the deepest mysteries in the universe: dark matter, dark energy, and the architecture of the cosmos.

The conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: what is matter? From there, Aaron walks through the fundamental particles that make up the visible universe before stepping into the far stranger territory of dark matter—an invisible form of mass that shapes galaxies and outweighs ordinary matter by roughly five to one—and dark energy, the mysterious property of space that appears to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

A major focus of the episode is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever built. Aaron describes how the Rubin Observatory and its extraordinary LSST camera will map billions of galaxies over a decade, offering an unprecedented window into the visible and invisible structure and evolution of the cosmos (Aaron led the team that built the LSST, largest digital camera ever constructed for astronomy) .

Supporting links of interest:

https://rubinobservatory.org

https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-first-look

https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Dennis Selkoe, one of the scientists whose work helped define the modern understanding of Alzheimer’s disease—and laid the foundation for the first treatments that can alter its course.

For decades, Alzheimer’s was viewed as an inexorable disease with no meaningful way to intervene. Dennis helped change that. The conversation traces the arc from the earliest pathological clues—amyloid plaques and tau tangles—to the molecular discoveries that transformed Alzheimer’s from a mysterious clinical syndrome into a biologically tractable disease.

Dennis also brings the perspective of a practicing neurologist, describing what it is like to diagnose and care for patients as memory, reasoning, and identity begin to slip away. From biomarkers and early detection to anti-amyloid antibodies, tau targeted therapies, and the possibility of prevention, this conversation explores how far the field has come—and what may lie just ahead.

It is remarkable that we now have two FDA approveddisease-modifying anti-amyloid therapies for Alzheimer's Disease on the market — Leqembi (lecanemab) and Kisunla (donanemab) — and it is only the beginning of new medicines that will be available to us in the coming decade.

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Gabriela “Gaby” Ochoa, an energetic and passionate marine conservation leader and founder of Ilili, about what it really takes to protect sharks—and the coastal communities whose lives are intertwined with them.

Gaby’s path began far from the ocean, growing up in Honduras with a love of animals and biology. What followed was an unexpected journey through turtle conservation, coral reef restoration, and eventually into one of the most complex conservation challenges in Central America: shark and ray protection in La Mosquitia, where marine ecosystems, indigenous communities, and local livelihoods are deeply connected.

The conversation explores why sharks matter ecologically, why their populations are in steep decline, and why conservation cannot succeed without understanding the people behind the fishery. Gaby shares how Ilili combines field science, fisheries monitoring, policy advocacy, public education, and trust-building with local communities to create a more durable model for conservation.

An engaging conversation about sharks, systems, and the kind of leadership required to protect both biodiversity and human dignity.

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Sam Blackman—pediatric neuro-oncologist, biotech founder, and storyteller—about the patients who shaped his life’s work and his search for a cure for children with brain cancer.

As a physician caring for children with brain tumors, Sam witnessed firsthand the limits of existing treatments—and the urgency felt by families facing devastating diagnoses. That experience became a driving force behind his decision to help build a different kind of biotech company: one focused not on adapting adult drugs for children, but on developing therapies specifically for them.

That vision led to the creation of Day One Biopharmaceuticals and ultimately to the development of tovorafenib, a targeted therapy approved in 2024 for children with low-grade glioma, the most common form of pediatric brain cancer.

This is a conversation about compassion as a catalyst for innovation—and how one doctor’s commitment to his patients helped turn unmet need into a new medicine.

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Tracy Dixon-Salazar—neuroscientist, geneticist, and one of the most powerful advocates working to transform how we understand severe childhood epilepsy.

Tracy’s journey began as a mother. When her daughter Savannah was two and a half, she began having unexplained seizures that eventually developed into Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS)—a rare and devastating form of childhood epilepsy marked by multiple seizure types, developmental challenges, and a high risk of premature death.

Determined to understand what was happening to her child, Tracy returned to school, eventually earning a PhD in neuroscience. Her scientific training helped uncover the genetic mechanisms underlying Savannah’s epilepsy and led to a precision-medicine insight that dramatically reduced her daughter’s seizures—giving Tracy a decade in which she could truly reconnect with her child.

Today, Tracy serves as Executive Director of the Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome Foundation, where she is pushing the field to move beyond symptom control toward treating epilepsy at its biological roots.

This conversation explores the intersection of science and lived experience—and how one mother’s determination is reshaping the future of rare disease research.

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Arya Singh, a rare disease advocate, researcher, and policy leader whose life story intersects with one of the most remarkable transformations in modern genetic medicine.

Arya was diagnosed at 18 months with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA)—a devastating neuromuscular disease that, until recently, was the leading genetic cause of death in infants. At the time, there were no treatments and little hope. What followed was a race against time: Arya’s parents helped launch the SMA Foundation, building the scientific collaborations that ultimately enabled the development of multiple life-changing therapies.

Arya herself became one of the earliest participants in the clinical trials that led to those breakthroughs—receiving the first antisense therapy for SMA and later transitioning to an oral treatment that transformed her strength, stamina, and independence.

In this conversation, Arya reflects on growing up inside a revolution in medicine, the courage required to participate in experimental trials as a child, and how scientific progress reshaped her future.

Now pursuing a PhD in population health sciences at Weill Cornell, Arya is working to ensure that the lessons of SMA—about science, advocacy, and policy—continue to drive progress for patients with rare diseases around the world.

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh sits down with Rafi Silver—actor, writer, and mindfulness teacher—for a wide-ranging conversation about performance, presence, and what it truly means to be “in the moment.”

Many will recognize Rafi from Amazon’s Fallout and roles in shows such as Law & Order: Organized Crime and FBI: Most Wanted. But beyond being an actor, he is the founder of Peak Mind Performance and a faculty member at Columbia University’s MFA Acting Program, where he integrates mindfulness, neuroscience, and performance psychology.

The conversation begins with a formative childhood moment on Broadway that ignited his love of acting—and unfolds into a deeper exploration of flow, self-consciousness, and the discipline of attention. Rafi explains mindfulness not as a retreat from life, but as a practice of bringing attention to the present moment without bias or judgment. He connects Buddhist philosophy to acting craft, elite athletics, and everyday life challenging the idea that performance is about control, and suggesting instead that it is about being fully present at the moment and allowing the self to disappear.

Additional information on Rafi's Mindfulness Performance Training at https://www.peakmindperformance.com/

In this episode of Let’s Talk About That, Anirvan Ghosh speaks with Frank Bennett, Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Ionis Pharmaceuticals, and a founding architect of antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapeutics—one of the technologies that launched modern genetic medicine.

For more than three decades, Frank has worked to turn the idea of targeting RNA into real medicines. At the center of the discussion is the discovery and development of nusinersen (Spinraza), the first approved therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA)—a devastating genetic disease that destroys motor neurons, leads to progressive paralysis, and in its most severe form often claims the lives of infants before age two. For decades, there were no disease-modifying treatments.

Frank explains how understanding RNA splicing unlocked a strategy to restore SMN protein production—and how early clinical data revealed something extraordinary: children gaining motor function once thought permanently lost.

The episode also explores other diseases that can be targeted by ASOs and why Frank believes we are just at the beginning of what RNA-targeted medicines can achieve.