STEMdentity

STEM is a team sport. Our scientific endeavors and engineering marvels are too complex to be handled by the same person. Today, I’m excited to talk to one of the people who are on the “front-lines” of science and engineering: Dr. Theresa Barosh, a professional science communicator for Colorado State University! Dr. Barosh got a PhD in Ecology and moved to science communication immediately after gr...

There’s no right way to give a fantastic talk and yet there seems to be a stigma in STEM against having written notes with you when you’re giving a talk at a conference or other large speaking engagement. There are so many other situations in which people are reading off of written scripts (audiobooks! acting!) so let’s drop the stigma. There are ways to easily set yourself up for giving a wonderf...

My favorite part of going to conferences is making new, unique connections that I could never have predicted. Paul Jenkins is one of those instant connections of someone who is the embodiment of someone who has figured out how to live a life well lived, with so much more to come! Paul is the CEO of two highly successful engineering firms and still spends a great deal of focus and energy on challen...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Dr. Thomas Weber, who is an associate professor at University of Rochester in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. We’re digging into his group’s 2026 PNAS journal...

Applying for a new job is a part of growing in your STEM career! ... and yet most of us do it so rarely that each application can feel overwhelming and stressful. I’ve had the opportunity to review many applications for several different job postings both at a large institution and at small businesses. Today’s episode is all about how to connect your job posting to the human on the other side of y...

Does this sound familiar: you need to start a paper but you stare at the blank page and then keep writing and deleting the first sentence. Or you have a draft that you need to pass onto your team for feedback but really it would be much better if you just stayed up for a few more hours and obsessively edited it. There are a lot of scenarios in our STEM work that put us in freeze or perfectionism c...

It’s graduation season! And graduating means transitions and transitions means people giving you advice, whether you asked for it or not. That being said, some advice is truly excellent and I’m excited to bring you advice from three STEM professionals who all graduated from the Colorado State University Systems Engineering program: Dr. Sarah Shaw, Dr. Art Villanueva, and Brian Johnston. They were...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Dr. Louis Rivoire, who is a research scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. We’re discussing his 2026 Communications Earth & Environment journal article, “Tracking j...

No matter where you are in your STEM career stage, chances are very high that you are someone’s mentee and you are also someone’s mentor, or you’re about to start mentoring. These relationships can go extremely well - and it’s also really common for them to run into bumps or roadblocks. What can you do when these challenges arise? I’m excited to welcome Dr. Jeff Pierce back onto STEMdentiy for par...

Mental health: we all know we should be doing “something” to take care of it, but it’s often easy to put mental on the back burner amidst our busy lives until we’ve forgotten about it for too long and realize that the kitchen is starting to burn down. Someone I really admire for realizing that his kitchen was in full flames, taking accountability and action, and coming out the other side stronger...

You’ve probably heard the advice, “You should be reading a peer-reviewed journal article every day of your life!”...and if you’re like me, you’re thinking things like, “Every day? Like even weekends? And my whole life? That’s a lot of really boring reading!” So I explored reading a journal article (almost) every single day for 30 days (yes, even weekends), but I added in the secret sauce that most...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Dr. Zoe Jewell, who is Adjunct associate professor at Duke University USA, Associate Academic at University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and co-founder of the nonprofit Wi...

Grad school: other than being short for graduate school, what is it like anyways for STEM fields? It’s actually surprisingly common for people to go to grad school without much idea of what it will entail. I was definitely one of those people - all I knew is that it was probably school-like and that it seemed like the thing to do when I looked around and didn’t like the job options that I could se...

Graduate school can be a murky path with either no clear exit ramp or too many exit possibilities (aka Jobs!) after graduation. Sometimes those options are clearly discussed within your degree program formally or informally and sometimes they’re not. A common option for graduate students getting a PhD is to get a postdoctoral position afterwards, especially if they want to stay in research. What’s...

If you are a (mostly) normal, functioning adult in a STEM career or school, you’ve probably experienced times like this: you are in a lecture or meeting or talk and you have a question. All of a sudden, you’re getting sweaty. Maybe shaky. You doubt your question. You consider whether you’ve forgotten how to speak words altogether. And the chance to ask your question passes, and you’re left feeling...

Curiosity. It seems like a hallmark of being a STEM professional and yet it feels like more than ever, curiosity has to take the backburner to emails, meetings, AI summaries, deliverables, reports, due dates, and on and on… So I did it: I intentionally chose to be curious about whatever I wanted for 15 minutes a day for 30 minutes. How did it go? Would I recommend it to the scientists and engineer...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an amazing peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Luca Hargitai, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath. We’re discussing her 2025 Psychological Medicine paper, “The role of psychological strengths in positive life outc...

Emails. They probably had a brief moment in the sun as a useful communication tool before they exploded into endless-headed Hydras with no end in sight. Does it need to be this way? In this episode, we figure out your relationship with email and steps towards not letting your inbox run your days. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and I sure don’t want my life to be a reply-all email...

As scientists and engineers, we are trained to tune into our minds. Critical thought and mental output is often the quantities recognized and nurtured throughout our career. But our minds don’t exist in a vacuum: they exist as a part of our body system. This episode with Somatic Coach Tami Schweber is all about tuning back into our bodies and why that might help us in our STEM careers. Check out T...

It’s easy to romanticize science as a series of lightning bolts: researchers have brilliant research questions and hypotheses suddenly come to them out of the blue! So if this doesn’t happen to you, you’re bad at research right? Right? No! There are simple, easy to apply frameworks for every major part of the research process form coming up with research questions to writing up results. Today, let...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an amazing peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Dr. Audrey Lin, who just wrapped up a postdoctoral researcher position at the American Museum of Natural History. We’re discussing her 2025 PNAS paper, “A legacy of genetic entang...

Having fun in your STEM job is something that probably seems like a good idea but can get completely lost in the rush of the day-to-day. Even more subversive, much of our time might be spent thinking about when we will be happy: We’ll be happy when we get the job, graduate with the degree, go on the vacation, get the paper published, get the successful experimental result… Instead of “I’ll be happ...

I’m dropping this quick minisode to invite us all to jump joy first into a creativity challenge: 15 minutes a day. 30 days. Just…explore the thing you’re curious about. Maybe you take an intentional break at work. Maybe you write the things that pop into mind on a sticky note and you do a deep dive at the end of your day. Curiosity and creativity are STEM super powers for us scientists and enginee...

Dr. Zitely Tzompa Sosa is the bright light we need in science policy. Trained as an atmospheric chemist, Zitely has navigated several international moves for school and work. Along the way, she found that working in policy is her guiding light for showing up to work as her most authentic self. Song of the week: The Wild Rover by Lankum More about Ravi, a true hero of atmospheric chemistry! Navigat...

Groundhog Day: it’s a holiday AND a movie! (Movie spoiler alert ahead FYI - it’s been out for >30 years so I don’t apologize.) For those of us who know the 1993 movie classic starring Bill Murray as grumpy TV weather forecaster Phil Conners, we’ll remember that poor Phil got himself stuck in a time loop, forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again. And ultimately, only...