Conversations with scientists

In STEM fields, being LGBTQ+ can be used against you. That's when having allies is especially important. Lucas Lixinski, a professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, in Australia talks honestly and openly about how hard being an ally can be, but also how wonderful it is.   Lixinski also describes about how, in tough times, one may need to hide one's L...

The annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is coming up July 8-11. If you are interested in stem cells, please tune into the sneak peek podcast of this meeting. And this is a sneak-peek of that sneak peek podcast. It's with the two program chairs of the meeting, Dr Fiona Doetsch from the University of Basel and Dr Nozomu Yachie from the University of British Col...

The two program chairs of the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research talk about the meeting and some trends they see. They are Dr Fiona Doetsch from the University of Basel and Dr Nozomu Yachie from the University of British Columbia who has a lab at the University of Osaka too. They talk about the promise of stem cell biology and stem cell therapy. About how malleable...

Soon the annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience starts where 20,000 attendees will be talking all about their work on the brain. This is a sneak peek of that meeting. It's with Dr. John Morrison from the University of California at Davis and Dr. Emilie Marcus from UCLA, who is also the incoming SfN Chair of the public education and communication committee of the Society for Neuroscience....

Summer courses are not exactly science and chilling but some courses do make it possible to combine the two a little. In this podcast Dr. Daria Ivanova, from the University of Geneva, Dr Sam Lord from University of California San Francisco and Dr. Will Ratcliff from Georgia Tech talk about the course and how they experienced it as a participant, as a teaching associated and as an instructor. 

This podcast was uploaded earlier this year but somehow it was deleted, sorry. So it's not quite a sneak-peek anymore...Whether or not you attended the  2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) or not, you might enjoy this conversation. It's with Dr. Amander Clark from the University of California at Los Angeles, she is also the current president of the ISSCR...

The annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) is about to start. Here's a sneak-peek of the meeting with Dr. Bruce Gelb who is the current president of ASHG, he is also a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. My co-host --Dr. Mike Fletcher senior editor at Nature Genetics-- and I, asked Bruce Gelb about the meeting but also about some trends such as gen...

Hear about some of the presentations at the upcoming 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. This sneak-peek that also is about some of the latest trends in neuroscience is with Yale University researcher Dr. Marina Picciotto, who is also the president of the Society for Neuroscience and Dr Damien Fair from the University of Minnesota. He is the chair of the Public Education and Commu...

This podcast is with Dr Sethuraman Panchanathan who directs the US National Science Foundation. He talks about his nickname, about AI and data science, about training AI models, about transparency, about the language of collaboration, competitiveness, about talent. He says: "I think what we need as a nation is not only to unleash every ounce of talent in our country, the domestic talent, at full f...

Can you be a scientist and parent? Of course. But it's not always easy. Dr. Ying Diao is at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in the chemical and biomolecular engineering department. She has a stack of awards, a lab and two children. She talks about her research, for instance a project focused on wearable electronics for plants with which one can track their growth and well-being. The id...

This episode is about dirt or, phrased more scientifically, soil. It’s about soil health, soil biodiversity and ecology. It’s a conversation with Dr. Ciska Veen, soil and ecosystems researcher at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and Dr. Wim van der Putten, who heads terrestrial ecology at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. (Art: J. Jackson; Music: Jungle Jam by Evert Z, licensed from Artlis...

Jean King, who is the dean of arts and sciences at WPI-Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, talks about what Nobel Laureate Katalin Karikó means to her and about persistence and success in science. (Art: J. Jackson; Music: Towers by sero, licensed from artlist.io)

What good does it do to start a big research project? How do you get it to soar? Dr. Anna Barker has some answers about that from the past, the present and the future. She is chief strategy officer at the Ellison Institute, a think tank and research institute. Before that, she was the principal deputy director of the US National Cancer Institute and deputy director for strategic scientific initiat...

The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, a big conference in neuroscience, is about to start. This year, it's in Washington. And here is a sneak peek of the meeting for you. Along with editors at Springer Nature, I got the chance to ask a bit about the meeting before it starts shortly. It was a mash up of a press conference of sorts and a wider discussion with colleagues from Scientific Americ...

Science and academia need diversity. Easier said than done because, for example, many students face housing insecurity, which keeps them from a focus on their studies. But that's something students are trying to change. I spoke with current and former students at UC Santa Cruz about this. In this episode you will hear from Abbi Cundall, Natalie Clifford, Emerald Waters, Zennon Ulyate-Crow and Nico...

Labs and a lab's team members often speak many languages. Science is international. But in a lab environment languages can set people apart. I wrote a story about lab languages for Nature Methods here: https://rdcu.be/doPnv There's a blog post here: https://cellmolbiocommunity.springernature.com/posts/podcast-lab-languages . And here is more from that story. It's a conversation with Dr. Denis Wirt...

Dr. Liz Bradley, who is on the computer science faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder, is an athlete-scientist. She is a mathematician and a former Olympic rower. In this podcast you will hear about her, about sweeping and sculling, about rugby, why it's good to have a notebook, about data analysis and some pitfalls that can happen in data analysis when you use software analysis but don't...

Science and the arts have much to say to one another. This episode is a conversation between scientists and artists, between scientists who foster the arts through fellowships and residencies and artists active in science and people who live in both worlds: science and the arts. All this makes for interesting and sometimes challenging groups of identities. With: London-based artist Charlotte Jarvi...

A conversation with David Neale, professor emeritus of the University of California Davis and director of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. As a forester and scientist, he works on trees, also the genomics of trees to understand more about their longevity and adaptability to events such as climate change. And he wants to empower the next generation people interested in these questions. (Art...

University of California San Diego researcher Dr. Gene Yeo is an athlete-scientist. He has completed two Iron Man competitions, a number of half Iron Man competitions and both full and half marathons. He says: "On these long long runs and long bike rides, you know, you get the time to sort of zone out a little bit, right. And it helps you focus on, you know, answering some questions." This podcast...

Cells push things around and get pushed around, it's all in a day's work. Tracking this, such as by tracking actin and the cytoskeleton, takes microscopy and labels. Lifeact, for example, is a popular, widely used label. This conversation is with the Lifeact developers Dr. Michael Sixt from Institute of Science and Technology Austria and Dr. Roland Wedlich-Söldner from the University of Münster in...

Dr. Steven Salzberg is a Johns Hopkins University researcher and director of the Center for Computational Biology at Hopkins. I spoke with him about genomics, about long-read sequencing, about human biology and human diversity, about funding, technology choice, about complete and incomplete genomes, about jobs in bioinformatics. He described his technology choices and about the choices one has to...

When scientists want to know about genes, chances are they use instruments called sequencers. Some of them can generate long-reads, which helps with analyzing genomes. The method of the year according to Nature Methods is: long read-sequencing. For a story I chatted with scientists at companies and in academia about long-read sequencing and did some podcasts, too. This episode is with Dr. Gordon S...

When scientists want to know about genes, chances are they use instruments called sequencers. There are quite a few companies that make sequencers. These instruments can give a read-out for example of a stretch of DNA or many stretches of DNA, even entire genomes and many genomes. The challenge has been that the instruments deliver--short reads—short readouts of sequence. What happens then is that...

Dr Uri Manor is a researcher at the Salk Institute who studies the dynamics of cells and Aly Putnam is a PhD student at University of Massachusetts in Amherst. They work in different fields and they are at different career stages. What they have in common is that they both have faced and continue to face adversity. They face an adversity of, the more invisible kind, because it's about their life i...