SKRAPS: Deep Dive

Kostas Kostarelos and Carolina Aguilar join us in this fantastic hour where they narrate to us, their personal experiences with Graphene and why it provides a novel way to interface with the brain and other parts of the nervous system.

It is an interesting journey from liposomal drug delivery to looking carbon nanotubes to graphene in Kostas' case. While, in Carolina's case how her journey through deep brain stimulation and diabetes franchise shaped her outlook and leadership skills/capabilities.

It's an intriguing chat and one that will definitely make you marvel at the depth of their knowledge and more importantly, of basketball.

Resources:
INBRAIN Neuroelectronics
Graphene Flagship
Kostas Kostarelos
Carolina Aguilar

This is one fantastic conversation that we are proud to state that no one has brought this story out to the listeners. 

Join us to listen to one of the best storytellers whose career has experienced the amazing innovation that straddles engineering and medicine. To make it more interesting, she is the first person we know of, who has experiences in people from pioneers in silicon valley, biotechnology and bioelectronic medicines (including making a name for herself). 

Kate recounts the story from her birth, to her varied upbringing, her interest in music and architecture, engineering to neuroscience. This is one amazing conversation. 

Show notes are on our blog pages at www.skrapsofbrilliance.com 

Join us to listen to Dr. Konstantinos Alataris' wondrous story of how he created Nevro. The company that challenged established players and in 5 years sneaked into the $2 billion dollar spinal cord market and became the "Big 4" in neuromodulation. 

Konstantinos' diplomacy, critical reasoning and how he overcomes challenges is a lesson to many budding and established entrepreneurs. 

He can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/konstantinos-alataris-phd-b77b915b/

Join us for an in-depth interview with the creators of the Mission ISRO podcast - Gaurav Vaz (Twitter handle: @GauravVaz) and Archana Nathan (@nathan_archana). Both Gaurav and Archana are part of a year old, media company called All Things Small (https://allthingssmall.in/).

This is a behind-the-scenes look at the journey that these wonderful people took to making this wonderful piece of scientific story-telling. 

Today's mini-episode is slightly different from what we normally do. We've decided to bring you a little bit of breaking news. Today, October 26, 2020 - Rune Labs announced the closing of their seed round of $5 million. While this is exciting in and of itself, the round was opened and completed during active quarantine for COVID19. Join us as we talk through how COVID has affected the fundraising process, how you can leverage some of the successful tactics, and what Brian Pepin and Rune Labs will get up to next. 

Dr. Amanda Grannas leads us a fantastic journey of her experiences as an analytical chemist and how analytical chemistry is a topic that most people don't think but still is such an important part of our life. It surrounds us yet we know so little about it. She re-lives some of the most personal journey of how climate change affects all of us and gives a very passionate defense of "why we must save our planet"? 

Finally, she closes by how her experiences shapes her leadership both in the lab as a "vial labeller" and her current life as the "Chief Research Officer" of Villanova  (via the VISIBLE program). 
 
Amanda's Twitter ID: @AmandaGrannas
Her lab homepage: http://agrannas.clasit.org/

Join us to talk about the discovery of some of the most amazing medicines that changed the face of treatment for patients with heart failure. Reducing the death sentence that congestive heart failure with a pharmacological drug is no mean feat. Our guest, Robert Ruffolo Jr has accomplished this feat as the lead scientist for Carvedilol, the first beta blocker ever to be approved for heart failure. He did this in the face of adversity and with a lot of scientific rigour and audacity. 

This is a story of how science improves patient's lives, literally. 

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If you love baseball (dare I say, CRICKET), you will love this episode that talks about intersection of data and sport.

Jarrod Kimber is an award winning documentary film maker. From humble beginnings in Melbourne to becoming a well known sports writer and documentary film maker, Jarrod has constantly used data to point to the fallacies, assumptions and substantiate where the game should go.

His writings are so data driven, yet simple to read that it comes across like a scientific paper - Aim, Hypothesis, Methods of data collection, Results, Discussion and Conclusion. While sports reporting was headline and story driven, Jarrod's data driven approach made the readers, sports administrators, coaches and players sit up. It produced a new meaning for data driven decision making in sport.

If you love sport and science, this episode is one for you.

DISCLAIMER: There will be an education about cricket for you as well.

Jarrod's social media details:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajarrodkimber?s=20

LinkedIn (for the "acting" professional): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarrodkimber/

YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/JarrodKimberYT/videos

Cricket with "balls": https://web.archive.org/web/20181224134625/https://cricketwithballs.com/

Imagine a world where there ia data deluge; much more than what it is today. What if there was a way to tap into this data without compromising privacy. While existing hardware and chip technologies do not have the ability to process information right on your device, they rely on sending this out to processing centers via the cloud. 

What if your device (be it a consumer device (like a phone or a driverless car) or a medical implant) was capable of doing all of this on the chip and enable real-time decision making. 

Our guest, Themis Prodromakis makes this possible via his research on memristors. To learn more, tune in. He is a professor at University of Southampton and has founded two companies -  ArC instruments (which is revenue generating without raising equity financing and enables multiple chip manufacturers) and Sonet.ai

Some key handles for social media savvy to follow: 
Centre for Electronics Frontiers that Themis directs : 
@CElFrontiers 

Themis is the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies: 
@RAEngNews

ArC Instruments: 
@ArcInstruments

University of Southampton: 
@unisouthampton

FORTE programme Grant in relation to #memristors: 
@FORTE_EPSRC

EPSRC:    @EPSRC

Royal Society that supports Themis' work:
@royalsociety

Most of you know "Cape of Good Hope" as the southern most tip of the Cape Peninsula. But our guest, Dr. Sanford Greenberg has overcome disability that affected him since he was a Junior at Columbia University. He has since overcome this limitation to chart an unprecedented success as an innovator, entrepreneur, in politics, administration and more recently, in philanthropy via his www.Endblindnessby2020.com campaign. 

We join Sandy in walking through his adult life and listening to his reflections on his strong bonds in life, impressions from society and how he is giving back to society. 

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