Socializing with Scientists

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, an...

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 re...

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 evoluti...

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,...

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.  De...

Lauren Osborne grew up in New York City and rural Vermont; she was born into a family of actors and artists. After college, she worked in book publishing. But once she had kids, she started to develop a strong interest in medicine; after several years of focused work she became a reproductive psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine. She recently conducted a fascinating study looking at the body and...

Louis had an uneventful childhood: Born and raised in Amsterdam, he was a normal kid who liked playing with friends and reading books. But his mother had a strong social justice bent, and she inspired Louis to live a life dedicated to helping others.  Dr. Louis Bont is now a world-renowned respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) researcher and pediatrician who heads the Department of Pediatrics at Wilhe...

As a child, Michela got lost in the mountains of Italy foraging for mushrooms. Adult Michela digs under deep Australian lakes searching for remnants of wildfire and ancient people, while raising her family in England. How does this feisty paleoecologist get it all done?  Dr. Michela Mariani is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK, and she recently published a paper in t...