Socializing with Scientists

Sinéad was born a scientist. As a child, she asked for extra math and physics lessons on the weekends, and she thrived at University College London upon finding fellow science folks.

Now, Sinéad Farrell, PhD, is a geophysicist at the University of Maryland, and she uses remote sensing satellites to study Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. She also explores the ice on foot, braving polar bears and frozen food to determine how the frozen ocean is changing over time.

You can find Sinéad at @dr-slfarrell.bsky.social.

Support the show

Logan grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, bears ambling through his Colorado backyard and summers full of prairie dog census volunteer work. But it wasn't until an Introduction to Linguistics class during his first semester at McGill University that he realized he wanted to pursue a degree in biology and language. With his formative years spent exploring nature, research in animal communication inevitably followed.

Logan James is now a postdoctoral fellow at McGill, in partnership with the Earth Species Project, where he studies the sounds that animals make and what those sounds mean to other animals. His latest research investigates whether humans prefer the same utterances as the animals themselves, from cricket trills, to songbird warblers and primate grunts.

If you'd like to play an online game to determine whether you prefer the same sounds as a frog, bird, mammal or insect, click here: https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc

Sparrow sounds provided by Stephen Nowicki and Susan Peters.

Túngara frog sounds provided by Michael Ryan.

Support the show

In college, Dianne didn't take any biology classes (she was a German studies major). But she was curious about almost everything, so in her first semester of graduate school, she tried an environmental microbiology class. She fell in love. 

Dianne Newmann is now a microbiologist at Caltech, studying bacteria and the antibiotic resistance they sometimes develop. She recently discovered that in regions of the world that have experienced a drought, the amount of antibiotic resistant bacteria increases in the soil, as well as in nearby hospitals. As our climate changes, droughts could become a more regular occurrence; antibiotic resistant bacteria could travel all around our interconnected world, she notes.

As pharmaceutical companies put an end to their antibiotic development programs, Dianne says, "It's really important that governments step in and continue to support the development of basic research for new drugs, because sometimes the profit incentive sadly isn't there for big pharmaceutical companies. And yet this is going to be a huge public health crisis." 

WHO Global antibiotic resistance surveillance report 2025

Support the show

Dylan was a kid who found comfort in math and fun in music, but ultimately he followed a path to science. He became a physicist and was inspired to study climate change by a speech that US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gave, as well as his time working at a backcountry lodge in the Canadian Rockies.

Dylan Jervis now works for GHGSat, a company that monitors greenhouse gas emissions, most notably methane, from space. His recent paper in Science used a constellation of high resolution satellites to estimate global methane emissions from individual sources.

Support the show

Katie was a curious, hard-working kid, but it wasn't until her freshman year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that she found her calling. That year, she happened to be placed in two geography classes, and her career trajectory started falling into place. 

Katie McMahon is now a PhD student in human environment geography at UC Santa Barbara, and her recent work in Science Advances  shows that children who were exposed to high humid heat in utero were significantly more likely to have stunted growth years later, as compared to those who experienced only high heat. Her research looks at the "intersections of climate & environmental change, social vulnerability, human health, and food & water security," and her next project will investigate how heat affects the health of farm workers in the Salinas Valley in California. 

Listen to this episode to learn more about Katie's journey, as well as what's ahead for her!

Support the show

To prepare for the moment his telescope landed on the moon, Brian read sports psychology books. "You're not going to read Kepler or Isaac Newton [to learn] about how to deal with high pressure situations," he said. It turned out he didn't actually need much help.

Brian Walsh is a space physicist and professor at Boston University, and he and his team created a telescope that landed on the moon last year. The telescope LEXI hitched a ride on a spacecraft built by Firefly Aerospace, and studied the interaction between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field.

Solar wind and geomagnetic storms can meddle with, or even harm, human-made technologies like satellites, GPS, and the electrical grid; now, Brian wants to protect Earth from these space phenomena. His new research suggests that putting mass into certain regions of space could divert geomagnetic storms away from Earth. (Here's a preprint of his work.)

Brian is on Bluesky and his research center is on Instagram.

Support the show

Sarah Kugel grew up smashing pokeweed berries to make her own paint and assembling intricate habitats for garter snakes. She was a kid who loved nature, and, when she went to college, she majored in resource ecology.

But Sarah always had an interest in business as well, and now she combines the two as the director of a nature center in Massachusetts. She considers the organization its own ecosystem, and works to serve the community while also ensuring the center has the resources it needs to function.

The South Shore YMCA Nature Center: https://ssymcanaturecenter.org/

Support the show

I'm thankful for all of you, and for the scientists who make this podcast possible! I hope you have a relaxing and peaceful Thanksgiving.

If you'd like to email us with comments or suggestions, we'd love to hear them at  [email protected] .

Find us on the Socializing with Scientists website, or follow us on Instagram or Bluesky.

Thanks for listening!

Support the show

Brad grew up in small town Illinois, playing outside all summer, building go-karts and tree houses in the woods. He went to the University of Illinois to study engineering and Carnegie Mellon for robotics. Later, he shrunk his focus: he began building tiny robots the size of a grain of sand.

Now, Brad Nelson, PhD, is a Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich. He just published research in which he and his team navigated tiny robots  to a precise spot in a large animal, where the robot released a drug. The idea is to send these drug delivery vehicles to a blood clot or a tumor, precisely targeting disease without the harmful side effects that happen when drugs course through the entire body. He hopes his microrobots will be able to deliver payloads of medicine to people within the next three years.

Support the show

Melissa was born into a family of scientists, but she always wanted to be a historian. As she grew up, however, she realized that science allowed her to satisfy her infinite curiosity and desire for discovery, and so she "went into the family business."

Melissa Harrison, PhD, is now a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she studies how human cells turn particular genes on and off,  developing from a single cell into a full-grown person. She uses the fruit fly as an easy, inexpensive model. Her latest research with UW colleague Peter Lewis, PhD, uncovered a protein that plays a role in a pediatric cancer called diffuse midline glioma. No one knows what this new knowledge will bring as researchers continue to study the protein, but, as Melissa says, "biotech companies can’t invest in this sort of foundational research….and so it really falls on the academic institutions to do that sort of foundation-building knowledge.” 

Her passion for knowledge combined with her resilience has helped her prevail when the science is difficult: "You know, you have to be a fighter in some ways, right? I'm really stubborn and I think that helps in science a little bit."

Support the show