Socializing with Scientists

Jenna was never really interested in school. She loved theater and the arts, but  academically, she struggled. She had dyslexia, and "always felt like I was failing...never thought I was very smart," she said.

It wasn't until her sophomore year of college that things started to turn around:  she discovered an academic field that truly excited her. Jenna had always been observant - nosy, even - wondering why people behaved the way they behaved, but her undergraduate mentor, David Frederick, "literally changed everything for me. He was an amazing teacher, introduced me to psychological science, gave me opportunities, took a chance on me," she said.

Jenna Alley, PhD, is now a developmental health psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, and she just published a major study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry on the importance of childhood maternal warmth on social safety and adolescent physical and mental health. She is also studying health disparity, health equity, and social safety in LGBTQ+ youth. 

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The first time she looked through a telescope, Shannon lost her breath. A self-proclaimed "science camp kid," she learned early that she wanted to do research, and that space would be her subject.

Shannon Curry, Ph.D. is now the director of NASA's MAVEN mission, a spacecraft that has been orbiting Mars since 2014. She and her team at the University of Colorado, Boulder are trying to determine how Mars lost its atmosphere, in order to reveal why all the ancient lakes and rivers on Mars disappeared. Their new research provides the first direct observation of a phenomenon known as "sputtering."

Besides studying Mars' atmosphere, though, MAVEN is also the only way the current Mars rovers can relay data back to Earth using an American spacecraft, and MAVEN is also the only way we can measure dangerous solar storms that could harm our astronauts and planet.

But the funding for MAVEN is scheduled to be eliminated in the 2026 budget; if that happens, it will be the death of a spacecraft, and the life work of many scientists, including Shannon. 

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When he was a child in Kitchener, Ontario, Scott MacIvor would go on urban walks with his mom. He had a bucket, and was allowed to bring home one piece of nature each day: a snake, or a bumblebee, a caterpillar. He loved examining them all.

Now Scott is an urban ecologist at the University of Toronto, working to connect people with the nature that's hidden all over the places where humans live, especially cities. He uses drones, thermal imaging, and other cutting edge technologies to study urban ecosystems to see how they’re doing and how their biodiversity can be enhanced. He observes the bees pollinating the plants, he wants migratory birds to feel welcome in urban parks, he encourages humans to experience it all, no fences. 

In a sort-of Part 2 to our episode with another scientist named Scott, ("Scott Krayenhoff helps hot cities cool off," Episode 8), here we investigate cities and nature once again, but this time with beauty and biodiversity in mind.

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When she was a kid in Iowa, Heather didn't know what she wanted to be when she grew up. She loved solving problems and adored science and math, and when she went to college, she majored in chemical engineering. Then she had an internship: it soon became clear to her that engineering was not the right career choice. 

So, after college, she moved to Seattle. Heather worked in a human genetics research lab for a year, and decided to apply to MD/PhD programs. She got in, the physician/researcher combo fitting her like a glove.

Fast forward several years, and Heather Mefford, MD, PhD, is now a geneticist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. She studies neurodevelopmental disorders and epilepsy in kids, and has made huge strides in decoding which genes cause many of these diseases. She's using mini brain organoids made from a patient's own skin cells to understand, and someday treat, some of these diseases. 

Read her new research in Science Translational Medicine here.

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The first eight episodes of Socializing with Scientists Season 1 have been a blast! Next Wednesday we'll publish another interview, but this week we're taking a little breather. I wanted to talk about what's coming up, to say thank you to the scientists who have spoken with me, and to tell the listeners who have been tuning in each week how much I appreciate you: There are so many other things you could be doing with your time, the fact that you're lending me your brains for an hour means so much!

There are two hidden scientist gems from the first part of Season 1 I want to highlight: Desirée Plata, the MIT environmental chemist, was a joy to speak with, and if you haven't had a chance to listen to her episode, please do so as fast as you can. She is smart and engaging, and you'll learn so much while feeling happy doing it. 

Lauren Osborne is the New York City reproductive psychiatrist who studies the biological mechanisms underlying postpartum depression; she hopes to develop a blood test for it. She is a superwoman, getting into and going to medical school, and then beginning a prestigious career in research and medicine, while raising three kids. Listen to her episode if you want to feel inspired.

Finally, if you like the podcast, please share it with your friends, or leave a little review. If you know someone who is curious, who likes science, or who is a teacher and has students looking for a career path, send them our way! The more people who can hear from these amazing scientists, the better.

Thank you!

Visit our website: https://socializingwithscientists.com/

Contact us with questions or comments: [email protected]

Follow us on Bluesky and X: @socwithsci

Follow us on Instagram: @socializingwithscientists

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Scott has always been a deep thinker. Dinner table conversations on his family's homestead on Vancouver Island instilled in him a strong environmental ethic, and a love for math and science pushed him to excel in college.

But when a professor posed the question, how much cooler would Toronto's summer climate be if half the rooftops were green and plant-based? his imagination took off, and he dove into the field of atmospheric science.

Scott Krayenhoff is now an associate professor at the University of Guelph's School of Environmental Sciences and recently published a research paper in PNAS that recounts simple mitigations that cities could do to reduce heat stress (such as planting trees and adding solar panels to buildings); kids likely know this intimately by how hot their bare feet feel on blacktop versus grass. Listen to Scott talk about how he became a scientist, what keeps him motivated, and why he thinks we need to connect deeply with our hyperlocal environment.

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Jan was born in Germany, but he grew up in the US: his parents moved after Chernobyl, because their lab Geiger counter showed high radiation levels despite being hundreds of miles from the reactor. 

His parents were scientists, but after high school, Jan wanted to forge his own path. He took random gigs - balcony welder, tree planter. During college, one of his professors suggested he try field research. Jan went to Panama to study electric river fish, and was hooked. "That was sort of my first experience of being a biologist for hire," he said.

Now, Jan Gogarten is a wildlife disease ecologist at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Greifswald, Germany, and he works in the rainforest at Taï National Park in Ivory Coast and Kibale Forest National Park in Uganda, among other locations. He investigates viruses and bacteria that could be among the next pathogens to jump into humans and make us sick.

This episode pairs well with last week's episode on Cédric Girard-Buttoz, who also studies in Taï National Park. Read Jan's research on environmental DNA (eDNA) here, and his work on how monitoring wildlife leads to infectious disease prevention here.

Find him and his institutions on Bluesky @jangogarten.bsky.social‬, @helmholtzhzi.bsky.social‬, @helmholtz-hioh.bsky.social‬

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When he was six years old, Cédric wanted to be Tarzan, following monkeys around the forest and studying their behavior.

He has pretty much made his dream come true. Cédric Girard-Buttoz has researched lemurs in Madagascar, macaques in Indonesia, and chimpanzees at the Taï Chimpanzee Project in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, and he has also studied bonobos and great apes. He is an evolutionary biologist at ENES, the bioacoustics research lab at the University of Saint-Etienne, France. With then-graduate student Tatiana Bortolato and others, he published a fascinating new study showing how chimps combine their calls into messages with many more meanings than we ever thought possible. 

Hear him describe what it's like to live in a rainforest for months at a time (he has spent many hours folding leaves into fly traps), how it feels to finally return home, and what philosophical questions he is trying to answer.

Find Cédric and his research institutions on Bluesky:

@tozbu.bsky.social (Cédric Girard-Buttoz)

@cnrsbiologie.bsky.social (Biological section of the French National Research Institut, CNRS)

@mpicbs.bsky.social (Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science)

@taichimpproject.bsky.social (Taï Chimpanzee Project)

@romanwittig.bsky.social (Taï field site manager, co-author on the study)

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Soumya has always been a tinkerer and inventor. He cobbled together a homemade radio as a 5th grader in northern India, and soon after that he started an electronics club in his dad's garage. He later graduated from medical school, but couldn’t shake a love of technology, and so he decided to go to graduate school for engineering in the US. He now combines both loves as a biomedical engineer, inventing better medical devices for not only patients in the US, but also those in countries without regular access to the latest medical technology, or even consistent electricity and the internet. 

Soumya Acharya, MD, PhD, is the graduate program director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design. He has led teams to create such innovations as VectorCam, a device that works on cheap smartphones to easily identify mosquitos and better squash malaria, as well as inexpensive, simple neonatal monitoring devices that can detect severe health problems in newborns in countries where regular medical care is difficult to find.

Visit our website: https://socializingwithscientists.com/

Contact us with questions or comments: [email protected]

Follow us on Bluesky and X: @socwithsci

Follow us on Instagram: @socializingwithscientists

Support the show

When Desirée was little, she'd roam around her grandmother's neighborhood in Maine, "kind of eavesdropping on people," she said. She began to notice a troubling pattern: many of the neighbors, and some of her family members, were suffering from odd neurological conditions and cancers. Desirée began to think that something in the air or water must be causing these illnesses. 

Desirée Plata, PhD, is now an environmental chemist at MIT studying the fate of chemicals that have escaped into the environment. She's trying to improve the world by studying new technologies and materials that also don't harm the environment and human health. 

Desirée is also director of the MIT Methane Network, which works to reduce levels of the powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and her biggest contribution so far is a substance called copper zeolite that can suck methane from coal mines and dairy barns. She has formed a company called Moxair to sell the innovation.

Follow her work at the MIT Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering on Instagram, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn

Visit our website: https://socializingwithscientists.com/

Contact us with questions or comments: [email protected]

Follow us on Bluesky and X: @socwithsci

Follow us on Instagram: @socializingwithscientists

Support the show