The Story Collider

Whether it’s a completing a lab, writing up a grant proposal, or just getting through everyday life, everyone needs a little help. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share moments where they lent or received support.

Part 1: One moment Keith Mellnick is cycling home, the next he’s in the emergency room of the hospital with no idea what happened to him.

Part 2: Medical student Fabiola Plaza feels compelled to help a woman on the New York subway get a doctor’s appointment.

Keith Mellnick is a freelance photographer whose past work in the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa has been highlighted by National Geographic Books, the Atlantic, and his brother's refrigerator. Based in Washington, DC, he currently works primarily with organized labor and progressive causes throughout the US. In addition to photography and storytelling, he enjoys any opportunity to escape into the woods--far from politics, screens, and oppressive DC heat indexes.

Fabiola Plaza is a fourth-year medical student at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. Native to Venezuela, she grew up as one of seven children in South Florida. She began playing the viola at a young age and attended a middle and high school for the performing arts. She then attended Columbia University, majoring in Neuroscience and Music. While at Columbia, Fabiola discovered her love for medicine and giving back to the community. Her current research interests involve language differences leading to healthcare disparities, health provider bias against those who are justice-involved, and the effects of gun violence in healthcare. When she is not busy studying, you can find Fabiola playing viola in the New York Repertory Orchestra, being very competitive at Bananagrams and any other board game, or completing another 1000+ piece puzzle.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

In science, we’re constantly learning, adapting and evolving. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers need to reckon with a new normal.

Part 1: After a neurological disorder leaves Tracey Starin visually impaired, she struggles to fill the void of her love for reading.

Part 2: At first comedian Ayanna Dookie doesn’t take her Lupus diagnosis seriously.

Tracey Starin is a writer and storyteller from Queens, NY. She has performed on actual and virtual stages in Boston, San Diego, Chicago, Toronto, and all over New York City. Tracey has appeared on numerous podcasts, including RISK!, Love Hurts, and The Volume Knob, as well as Stories from the Stage for World Channel. Tracey is the co-producer of the storytelling series Food for Thought for the National Storytelling Network. She also co-hosts a monthly storytelling show at Pine Box Rock Shop in Brooklyn called Just One More Thing. 

Ayanna Dookie is a stand-up comedian based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the 2014 winner of The She Devil Comedy Festival. She also earned a spot in the semi-finals of NBC’s Stand-Up for Diversity and a finalist in the New York Underground Comedy Festival Emerging Comics Competition. She has appeared on Comcast-on-Demand, is currently a cast member on Fox's Laughs, and has been featured in the New York Post, Health Magazine, and the Lifetime Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

We all know life isn’t perfect, but sometimes we get a do-over. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers get a chance to redeem a part of their past.

Part 1: When Barbara Todd isn’t with her dad when he passes, she searches for forgiveness.

Part 2: Grad student Nina Christie’s preconceived notions of the Skid Row needle exchange get turned on their head when she begins volunteering there.

Barbara Todd started her American journey after relocating from British Columbia, Canada to California as a young RN over 30 years ago. The move was meant to be a one or two year adventure but after finding the love of her life, having two amazing children and continuing with an extremely rewarding career in healthcare - the adventure continues! Barb began her storytelling journey through listening to the many amazing podcasts celebrating true storytelling. She found a local live event hosted by Capital Storytelling in Sacramento and was hooked! After participating in in-person and virtual classes as well as open mic and curated events, Barb applied and was accepted to the Capital Storytelling Ambassadors program. Through this amazing opportunity, Barb has been bringing the power of true storytelling to her colleagues in healthcare ever since!

Dr. Nina Christie is a newly-minted Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and is currently postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico at the Center for Alcohol, Substance Use, and Addictions. Her research focuses on the intersection of social connection and substance use, with an emphasis on harm reduction and drug policy. She is passionate about positively impacting human health and wellbeing through the lens of psychology, public health, and policy. She is also a ~lover~ of all things Taylor Swift, and she enjoys baking new recipes for her friends and family.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers experience the most humbling of human experiences: being embarrassed.

Part 1: Emma Yarbrough feels in control of her future after undergoing an egg retrieval operation until a burning sensation sends her for a loop.

Part 2: When the doctor finds blood in Carlos Kotkin’s urine, he ends up having to undergo some deeply humiliating procedures.

Emma Yarbrough is a storyteller, actor, playwright, arts administrator and silly billy from beautiful (and tiny) Eufaula, Alabama. Fans of Story Collider in Atlanta may recognize her as one of our producers and hosts. During the day, she’s the assistant director of Emory Arts at Emory University. At night, she’s a handmaiden to her cats Christopher Robin and Christopher Lloyd.

Carlos Kotkin is an author, screenwriter and humorist. His dating memoir "Please God Let It Be Herpes: A Heartfelt Quest For Love And Companionship" was published in 2012 and he has also written a number of animated features, including Rio 2, Open Season: Scared Silly, The Star and the soon-to-be released Giants of La Mancha. His stories have been featured in The New York Times’ Modern Love, Reader's Digest and Sunset Magazine, even though the Sunset Magazine was whittled down from five pages to one paragraph. (They still paid him.) His stories have also been aired on The Moth, Risk and KRCW’s Unfictional podcasts. He was valedictorian of his high school, then promptly dropped out of the University of Southern California, so he never thought he’d be in a show about science, but here we are. He's not a fan of writing about himself in the third person.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

If you think about it, science is one big act of searching. There's always something to look for, whether it's the answer to a hypothesis or the next Goldilocks planet. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers find themselves looking high and low.

Part 1: Comedian Sam Lyons is determined to not get involved with his partner’s feral cats, until one goes missing.

Part 2: In an act of desperation, Bhaskar Sompalli goes on a hunt to find free lab equipment to make his graduate school experiment work.

Sam Lyons is a comedian, musician, actor, and Gilmore girls enthusiast - and not always in that order! He joined our Story Collider staff with an aversion to science, but the practice of sharing his own stories and helping other tellers with them as opened his eyes to how science is all around us, ready to embrace without strangling. You can likely catch Sam and his partner Emma feeding feral cats in an alley near you.

Bhaskar Sompalli is an engineer and storyteller living in the bay area. After graduate studies in Tulsa and Chicago, he's worked on several technologies over the years; from fuel cells and batteries to semiconductors, and founded a battery startup. An optimist who is passionate about clean tech, he now works full-time on using hydrogen fuel cells and batteries to tackle climate change. He has narrated several of his personal essays on San Francisco's KQED NPR station. He is a writer whose first fiction novella Utopia Revisited 2050 is now out on Amazon as a paperback, and is currently working on his second novel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

As famed Iron Chef Alton Brown once said: “Everything in food is science”. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers discover something about themselves through the science of food.

Part 1: Corn researcher Katie Murphy is scared becoming a TikToker will ruin her credibility as a serious scientist.

Part 2: As a kid, Scottie Rowell gets an unpleasant surprise when they don’t wait to eat their grandmother’s pickles.

Katie Murphy is a plant biologist who loves studying the inner workings of corn. She is the Director of Phenotyping and Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a non-profit research institute in St. Louis, Missouri. Her research group studies phenotyping, which means measuring the physical traits of plants. She holds a PhD in Plant Biology from UC Davis, and a Bachelor's in Chemistry from Stanford University. Katie's goal is to make a secure, sustainable food supply that can withstand future climates. She shares her research on TikTok @Real_Time_Science.

Scottie Rowell is a Queer, Agender, Autistic artist based in Atlanta, GA. As a storyteller and puppeteer, Scottie’s career is focused on performances and experiments in play in non-traditional theater spaces. As owner of Teller Productions, Scottie creates tactile, immersive experiences for families using sustainable materials (all repurposed, discarded, or easily recycled). Scottie’s show Super Cello! premiered with the National Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in April 2022. Other clients include the Georgia Aquarium, the Alliance Theater, the Center for Puppetry Arts, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Visuals and fun at ScottieRowell.com and TellerProductions.com. (Yes, Scottie made that pickle shirt for the story.)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Matters of the heart aren’t usually associated with science, but in this week’s episode, both of our storytellers turn to science to cope with heartbreak.

Part 1: When Anna Peterson gets dumped she takes a job with two national wildlife refuges in remote Alaska to prove to her ex he made a mistake.

Part 2: When Moiya McTier’s fiancé breaks up with her weeks before their wedding, she turns to the Milky Way to heal.

Anna Peterson is originally from Colorado, but has called Atlanta home for nearly 2.5 years. She obtained her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2019 from the University of Tennessee, and has studied parasites and pathogens in everything from salamanders to rats to humans. In her free time, she enjoys hanging out with her dog Hank, running long distances very slowly, and discovering the city of Atlanta by bicycle.

Dr. Moiya McTier is an astrophysicist, folklorist, and science communicator. After graduating as Harvard’s first student to double major in astrophysics and mythology, Moiya earned her PhD in astronomy at Columbia University. Moiya’s mission is to help people better understand the world around them through science and facts. She does that through her podcasts Exolore and Pale Blue Pod, a mythology show for PBS called Fate & Fabled, and her hit book THE MILKY WAY: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

People with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM fields, and all too often, they face isolation and ableism in academia. In this week’s episode, two stories from the recently published book Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias, have been adapted for the podcast. Both of our storytellers showcase how they, as scientists with disabilities, navigate their careers.

Part 1: When Skylar Bayer’s heart condition sidelines her from doing her dive research, she struggles with not feeling worthy enough as a scientist.

This story was originally produced by SoundBites and aired on Maine Public Radio in 2019.

Part 2: When Mpho Kgoadi loses feelings in his legs as a child, he worries he won’t be able to achieve his dreams.

Skylar Bayer is a marine biologist, a storyteller, and a science communicator. She completed her Ph.D. in the secret sex lives of scallops, a subject that landed her on The Colbert Report in 2013. Since then she has dabbled in a diversity of science communication activities, all of which you can read about on her website (skylarbayer.wordpress.com). She’s an alum of the D.C.-based Sea Grant Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship program. She is the co-editor with fellow MIT alum, Gabi Serrato Marks, of the book Uncharted: how scientists navigate health, research, and bias. When there isn’t a pandemic going on, she also enjoys Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the gentle art. Follow her on Twitter @drsrbayer.

Mpho Kgoadi is a PhD student at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He has a rare auto-immune disease called Transverse Myelitis and has been using a wheelchair for the past 15 years. He has always been fascinated by the mysteries of the cosmos, and his research focuses on the effect of dark matter in the early universe. Outside of his research, he is passionate about science outreach and making scientific knowledge accessible to people from diverse backgrounds, he loves coding and have a deep passion for tech. In his free time, he enjoys stargazing, reading science fiction novels, and playing video games.

Purchase a copy of Uncharted and read more powerful first-person stories by current and former scientists with disabilities or chronic conditions. Books can be purchased here: uncharted.ck.page

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Searching for a job in science or in another field is often a daunting task with plenty of challenges, both expected and unexpected. In this week’s episode, each of our storytellers embark on a job hunt that is anything but straightforward.

Part 1: To get funding for grad school, Hakim Walker needs to pass a lie detector test.

Part 2: In order to keep up the facade of living the American Dream, Xavier Bettencourt applies for a job as a science educator.

Hakim Walker was born in Brooklyn, New York to a large family of Jamaican immigrants. A graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School, he studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Boston University, and was among the first in his family to attend college. He worked as an admissions officer and research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before earning his Ph.D in Mathematics from the George Washington University in 2017. Currently, Hakim is an instructor and residential advisor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses in the Department of Mathematics. He is also a faculty mentor for the Emerging Scholars Program, which supports disadvantaged Harvard students who wish to pursue careers in STEM. Among other things, Hakim enjoys traveling (especially road trips), card and board games (especially chess), and educational science channels on YouTube (especially Vsauce). He also loves writing puzzles, poetry, short stories, and dialogues. He is a two-time TEDx speaker, and he has performed and lectured at various venues and campuses around the country.

For over two decades Xavier Bettencourt has been bringing laughter to the Sacramento and Bay Areas. An improviser, comedian, drag artist, storyteller and fashionista, Xavier’s true passions are bringing joy and love to others, and building and growing the queer performance spaces that are truly needed today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, burnout is defined as “physical, emotional or mental exhaustion, accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance and negative attitudes towards oneself and others.” This is what our storytellers are experiencing in this week's episode.

Part 1: During her pediatric residency, Erica Martinez finds herself struggling to feel empathy for some of her patients.

Part 2: While working as a doctor in South Bronx, Karinn Glover feels overwhelmed and powerless when trying to help a patient with substance use issues.

Erica Martinez is a physician finishing her last year of a three year residency training in pediatric medicine. Originally from Minnesota, she moved east for college and earned her MD from New York Medical College. She is passionate about both children’s health and physician wellness, and she enjoys knitting tiny baby hats in her spare time.

After graduating from Howard University with a BA in History, Dr. Glover worked at Essence Magazine and as an Account Executive for Verizon. She followed her curiosity about medicine and ultimately attended SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and obtained an MPH from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Currently Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Glover teaches psychopharmacology and psychotherapy to Psychiatry and Family Medicine residents. Her career as a consultant and educator have informed her expertise in the fields of health equity, workplace mental health, and organizational success.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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