Socializing with Scientists

Case was a regular California kid: he skateboarded, he surfed, and he also liked math. He tried a few different majors in college, but finally found his calling: environmental engineering. He went to graduate school, and a lucky encounter during the first week changed his whole life.

Case van Genuchten, PhD, now works for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and just published research showing that arsenic from drinking water waste can be changed into a valuable commodity. He has studied how to remove arsenic from drinking water for years, but now, in this new paper in Science Advances, he has figured out how to turn arsenic waste into metallic arsenic, a raw material important for digital infrastructure and clean energy systems. Decrees in the EU and US over the past few years have declared metallic arsenic a Critical Raw Material, making his research even more important.

To see a beautiful video on Case's work, check out "King of Poison," from the Underground Channel.

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Ever since she was a little girl, Cassia has loved playing the piano. Her mother made sure she had music lessons, and Cassia felt like she was fulfilling her mother's dream learning the instrument. 

But she also loved science and math, and after her undergrad years she found herself searching for a research field and a graduate program that inspired her. She happened to read a few studies linking neuroscience with music, and was hooked.

Now, Cassia Low Manting, PhD, is a neuroscientist at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, studying how the brain pays attention to music, and if it differs depending on whether the person has received musical training. Her new research paper was just published in Science Advances.

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Charlie grew up in England, surrounded by books. At age 11, she declared that she wanted to be a research scientist. When she was a teenager, however, she started gravitating towards helping people more directly and went to medical school at age 18. After graduating, though, she realized her heart wasn't in medicine, and a remembered lecture from years earlier on post-stroke brain recovery inspired her to follow her childhood dream of doing research. 

Charlotte Stagg, MBChB, PhD is now a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. She studies motor function in humans, and was part of a team that created a helmet that sends ultrasound pulses into very specific parts of the brain. She plans to study whether the helmet can non-invasively treat people with neurological, and even psychiatric, disorders. 

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Bradley grew up in suburban Australia, fascinated by the scientists in movies like Jurassic Park. He also eagerly read biographies and memoirs, and his love of animals and people soon grew into a successful career as a comparative psychologist.

Bradley Smith, PhD, now teaches and researches at Central Queensland University in Australia, spending much of his time thinking, learning, and talking about dingoes. Dingoes are controversial creatures in Australia. Bradley explains why this is, how dingoes feature in aboriginal culture, where they came from, and why it all matters to the government. 

He also talks extensively about the world-wide phenomenon of the Australian kids' TV show, Bluey. Bradley just wrote a scientific paper with a student in which they study how the show builds resilience in children who watch its 150 episodes. 

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As a child, Samuel enjoyed eating "potato smileys" and "turkey dinosaurs," even though most of his meals were homemade. As he grew up, he played sports and became interested in optimizing his nutrition to improve performance. But his first day on the job at a sports nutrition company convinced him to apply to graduate school to study nutrition, not sell it. 

Now, Samuel Dicken, PhD, is a research fellow at University College London, studying the foods people eat and how they affect their health and weight. In a new study published in Nature Medicine, he gave 55 people either an ultraprocessed or a minimally processed diet and watched how their bodies reacted. The results could someday change dietary guidelines.

Find Samuel on LinkedIn, X, or Instagram.

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Fadi Lakkis grew up in Lebanon during a time of political unrest, which led him to perpetually question the world around him. Once he became a nephrologist with a speciality in immunology and transplantation, this questioning pushed him to do better science, as well as approach research from unexpected angles.

Now, Fadi Lakkis, MD, is a professor at Stanford University, and he's working to help better match donor's kidneys with the people who need them, as well as determine which immunosuppressive drugs work best in which patients. His new paper in Science Translational Medicine elaborates on this work. 

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Allison grew up during a tumultuous time in a city bruised by crime. Playing sports helped secure a kid's reputation, so she focused on athletics, eventually becoming the first female pole-vaulter in the state of Ohio. Division I universities recruited her (she was also class valedictorian), and she settled into life at an Ivy League college. Then, she started studying sleep.

Now, Major Allison Brager, PhD, is a neurobiologist working to keep soldiers safe by understanding their sleep, because not getting enough can cause "a cognitive lapse that is the difference between life and death." Her many research papers focus on circadian rhythm, jet lag, stress, sleep deprivation, caffeine and napping. 

We talk about gymnastics, pole vaulting, wearables, crime in her hometown, and taking brainwaves down a notch. She continues to be an avid athlete, which she documents on her very active Instagram account. You can follow her @docjockzzz on Instagram.

Follow Socializing with Scientists on Instagram, Bluesky, and X. Or visit our webpage, socializingwithscientists.com.

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We have several great episodes in the works! I can't wait to share them, starting in September. 

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Raised in a bilingual household in Istanbul, Lidya had lots of questions. She was keenly interested in people, and, on top of that, wondered things like, does her personality change when she speaks a different language? This led to her pursuing psychology in college to study human behavior in many different contexts.

Now in graduate school at the University of Amsterdam, Lidya Yurdum's fascination with language has led to an interest in music (language "is surprisingly close to music in many ways," she says), and she is currently focusing on babies: Lidya's work on whether a parent singing to their baby changes mood was just published in Child Development. Researchers gathered data on families by pinging parents' cell phones to ask them if they had sung to their child in the past few hours, and what kind of mood their baby was in.

Lidya also uses citizen science approaches - game-ified online experiments - to investigate and reach a wide variety of people all over the world. 

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As a child, Katie thrived in her suburban Chicago backyard, reading The Boxcar Children and leading her little brother on adventures. A second grade unit on Jane Goodall cemented her curiosity about primates, and two fantastic high school teachers excited her about biology. But it wasn't until college that she thought science could be a career.

Now, Katherine Amato is a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. She studies how humans evolved, looking at their microbiome and the microbiome of primates, trying to figure out if bugs in our guts helped direct human evolution. She was also recently part of a team that published a fascinating research paper on the effect of juicing fruits and vegetables on the gut microbiome. (Spoiler: It isn't great for it.)

Katie is a down-to-earth, curious person with two kids and a new puppy who wants to know how we can live to better support the ecosystem within our bodies, and how humans became what we are today.

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