Dr. Rachel Gatlin entered neuroscience with curiosity and optimism. Then came chaos. She started her PhD at the University of Utah in March 2020—right as the world shut down. Her lab barely existed. Her advisor was on leave. Her project focused on isolation stress in mice, and then every human on earth became her control group. Rachel fought through supply shortages, grant freezes, and the brutal postdoc job market that treats scientists like disposable parts. When her first offer vanished under a hiring freeze, she doubled down, rewrote her plan, and won her own NIH training grant. Her story is about survival in the most literal sense—how to keep your brain intact when the system built to train you keeps collapsing.

RELATED LINKS

• Dr. Rachel Gatlin on LinkedIn

• Dr. Gatlin’s Paper Preprint

• Dr. Eric Nestler on Wikipedia

• News Coverage: Class of 2025 – PhD Students Redefine Priorities

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Before she was raising millions to preserve fertility for cancer patients, Tracy Weiss was filming reenactments in her apartment for the Maury Povich Show using her grandmother’s china. Her origin story includes Jerry Springer, cervical cancer, and a full-body allergic reaction to bullshit. Now, she’s Executive Director of The Chick Mission, where she weaponizes sarcasm, spreadsheets, and the rage of every woman who’s ever been told “you’re fine” while actively bleeding out in a one-stall office bathroom.

We get into all of it. The diagnosis. The misdiagnosis. The second opinion that saved her life. Why fertility preservation is still a luxury item. Why half of oncologists still don’t mention it. And what it takes to turn permission to be pissed into a platform that actually pays for women’s futures.

This episode is blunt, hilarious, and very Jewish. There’s chopped liver, Carrie Bradshaw slander, and more than one “fuck you” to the status quo. You’ve been warned.

RELATED LINKS

• The Chick Mission
• Tracy Weiss on LinkedIn
• Fertility Preservation Interview (Dr. Aimee Podcast)
• Tracy’s Story in Authority Magazine
• NBC DFW Feature
• Stork’d Podcast Episode
• NuDetroit Profile
• Chick Mission 2024 Gala Recap

FEEDBACK

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

EPISODE DESCRIPTION:

Libby Amber Shayo didn’t just survive the pandemic—she branded it. Armed with a bun, a New York accent, and enough generational trauma to sell out a two-drink-minimum crowd, she turned her Jewish mom impressions into the viral sensation known as Sheryl Cohen. What started as one-off TikToks became a career in full technicolor: stand-up, sketch, podcasting, and Jewish community building.

We covered everything. Jew camp lore. COVID courtship. Hannah Montana. Holocaust comedy. Dating app postmortems. And the raw, relentless grief that comes with being Jewish online in 2025. Libby’s alter ego lets her say the quiet parts out loud, but the real Libby? She’s got receipts, range, and a righteous sense of purpose.

If you’re burnt out on algorithm-friendly “influencers,” meet a creator who actually stands for something. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t filter. And she damn well earned her platform.

This is the most Jewish episode I’ve ever recorded. And yes, there will be guilt.

RELATED LINKS

• Libby’s Website: https://libbyambershayo.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/libbyambershayo
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@libbyambershayo
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/libby-walker
• Schmuckboys Podcast: https://jewishjournal.com/podcasts/schmuckboys
• Forbes Feature: Modern Mrs. Maisel Vibes https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshweiss
• Medium Profile: https://medium.com/@libbyambershayo

FEEDBACK

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For guest suggestions or sponsorship, email [email protected].

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When the system kills a $2.4 million study on Black maternal health with one Friday afternoon email, the message is loud and clear: stop asking questions that make power uncomfortable. Dr. Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at UNC, built a groundbreaking project called LIFE-2 to uncover how racism and stress shape the biology of pregnancy. It was science rooted in community, humanity, and truth. Then NIH pulled the plug, calling her work “DEI.” Jaime didn’t quit. She fought back, turning her grief into art and her outrage into action. This episode is about the cost of integrity, the politics of science, and what happens when researchers refuse to stay silent.

RELATED LINKS

• The Guardian article

• NIH Grant

• Jaime’s LinkedIn Post

• Jaime’s Website

• Faculty Page

FEEDBACK

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Allison Applebaum was supposed to become a concert pianist. She chose ballet instead. Then 9/11 hit, and she ran straight into a psych ward—on purpose. What followed was one of the most quietly revolutionary acts in modern medicine: founding the country’s first mental health clinic for caregivers. Because the system had decided that if you love someone dying, you don’t get care. You get to wait in the hallway.

She’s a clinical psychologist. A former dancer. A daughter who sat next to her dad—legendary arranger of Stand By Me—through every ER visit, hallway wait, and impossible choice. Now she’s training hospitals across the country to finally treat caregivers like patients. With names. With needs. With billing codes.

We talked about music, grief, psycho-oncology, the real cost of invisible labor, and why no one gives a shit about the person driving you to chemo. This one’s for the ones in the waiting room.

RELATED LINKS

• AllisonApplebaum.com
• Stand By Me – The Book
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• The Elbaum Family Center for Caregiving at Mount Sinai

FEEDBACK

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Rebecca V. Nellis never meant to run a nonprofit. She just never left. Twenty years later, she’s still helming Cancer and Careers after a Craigslist maternity-leave temp job turned into a lifelong mission.

In this 60-minute doubleheader, we cover everything from theater nerdom and improv rules for surviving bureaucracy, to hanging up on Jon Bon Jovi, to navigating cancer while working—or working while surviving cancer. Same thing.

Rebecca’s path is part Second City, part Prague hostel, part Upper East Side grant writer, and somehow all of that makes perfect sense. She breaks down how theater kids become nonprofit lifers, how “sample sale feminism” helped shape a cancer rights org, and how you know when the work is finally worth staying for.

Also: Cleavon Little. Tap Dance Kid. 42 countries. And one extremely awkward moment involving a room full of women’s handbags and one very confused Matthew.

If you’ve ever had to hide your diagnosis to keep a job—or wanted to burn the whole HR system down—this one's for you.

RELATED LINKS

• Cancer and Careers
• Rebecca Nellis on LinkedIn
• 2024 Cancer and Careers Research Report
• Working with Cancer Pledge (Publicis)
• CEW Foundation
• I'm Not Rappaport – Broadway Info

FEEDBACK

Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship opportunities, email [email protected].

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Sally Wolf is back in the studio and this time we left cancer at the door. She turned 50, brought a 1993 Newsday valedictorian article as a prop, and sat down with me for a half hour of pure Gen X therapy. We dug into VHS tracking, Red Dawn paranoia, Michael J. Fox, Bette Midler, and how growing up with no helmets and playgrounds built over concrete somehow didn’t kill us.

We laughed about being Jewish kids in the suburbs, the crushes we had on thirty-year-olds playing teenagers, and what it means to hit 50 with your humor intact. This episode is part nostalgia trip, part roast of our own generation, and part meditation on the privilege of being alive long enough to look back at it all. If you ever watched Different Strokes “very special episodes” or had a Family Ties lunchbox, this one’s for you.

RELATED LINKS

Sally Wolf Official Website

Sally Wolf on LinkedIn

Sally Wolf on Instagram

Cosmopolitan Essay: “What It’s Like to Have the ‘Good’ Cancer”

Oprah Daily: “Five Things I Wish Everyone Understood About My Metastatic Breast Cancer Diagnosis”

Allure Breast Cancer Photo Shoot

Tom Wilson’s “Stop Asking Me the Question” Song

FEEDBACK

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Dr. Nikki Maphis didn’t just lose a grant. She lost a lifeline. An early-career Alzheimer’s researcher driven by her grandmother’s diagnosis, Nikki poured years into her work—only to watch it vanish when the NIH’s MOSAIC program got axed overnight. Her application wasn’t rejected. It was deleted. No feedback. No score. Just gone.

In this episode, Oliver Bogler pulls back the curtain on what happens when politics and science collide and promising scientists get crushed in the crossfire. Nikki shares how she’s fighting to stay in the field, teaching the next generation, and rewriting her grant for a world where even the word “diversity” can get you blacklisted. The conversation is raw, human, and maddening—a reminder that the real “war on science” doesn’t happen in labs. It happens in inboxes.

RELATED LINKS:

• Dr. Nikki Maphis LinkedIn page

• Dr. Nikki Maphis’ page at the University of New Mexico

• Vanguard News Group coverage

• Nature article

• PNAS: Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010–2016

FEEDBACK:

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Carla Tardif has spent 17 years as the CEO of Family Reach, a nonprofit that shouldn’t have to exist but absolutely does—because in America, cancer comes with a price tag your insurance doesn’t cover.

We talk about shame, fear, burnout, Wegmans, Syracuse, celebrity telethons, and the godforsaken reality of choosing between food and treatment. Carla’s a lifer in this fight, holding the line between humanity and bureaucracy, between data and decency. She’s also sharp as hell, deeply funny, and more purpose-driven than half of Congress on a good day.

This episode is about the work no one wants to do, the stuff no one wants to say, and why staying angry might be the only way to stay sane.

Come for the laughs. Stay for the rage. And find out why Family Reach is the only adult in the room.

RELATED LINKS

• Family Reach
• Financial Resource Center
• Carla on LinkedIn
• Morgridge Foundation Profile
• Authority Magazine Interview
• Syracuse University Feature

FEEDBACK

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Jennifer J. Brown is a scientist, a writer, and a mother who never got the luxury of separating those roles. Her memoir When the Baby Is Not OK: Hopes & Genes is a punch to the gut of polite society and a medical system that expects parents to smile through trauma. She wrote it because she had to. Because the people who gave her the diagnosis didn’t give her the truth. Because a Harvard-educated geneticist with two daughters born with PKU still couldn’t get a straight answer from the very system she trained in.

We sat down in the studio to talk about the unbearable loneliness of rare disease parenting, the disconnect between medical knowledge and human connection, and what it means to weaponize science against silence. She talks about bias in the NICU, the failure of healthcare communication, and why “resilience” is a lazy word. Her daughters are grown now. One’s a playwright. One’s an artist. And Jennifer is still raising hell.

This is a conversation about control, trauma, survival, and rewriting the script when the world hands you someone else’s lines.

Bring tissues. Then bring receipts.

RELATED LINKS

• When the Baby Is Not OK (Book)

• Jennifer’s Website

• Jennifer on LinkedIn

FEEDBACK

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