Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Sidarta Ribeiro is a Brazilian neuroscientist, writer, and science communicator. He is the Founder and Vice Director of the Brain Institute at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil, where he has been a full professor since 2008. His fields of research include memory, sleep and dreams, neuroplasticity, symbolic competence in non-human animals, computational psychiatry, and...

David Edmonds is a British philosopher and a Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He is the author of many books, including  The Murder of Professor Schlick, Would You Kill the Fat Man?, Caste Wars: A Philosophy of Discrimination,  and  Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Matc...

Samantha Barbas is a legal and cultural historian and the author of several books on media history and legal history topics, with a focus on journalism, privacy, defamation, and the First Amendment. A Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. Her latest book,  Actual Malice: Civ...

Lyn Barrett is an author, speaker, pastor, retreat leader, and survivor of early childhood trauma. Diagnosed in 1992 with Multiple Personality Disorder, now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.), she endured several decades of inner chaos and deep pain. Even so, most of the time, she was able to maintain a professional life as an elementary school teacher and principal, as well as perse...

Wladimir Lyra is an astronomer at New Mexico State University whose research focuses on high-end computer simulations of planet formation, both in our own solar system and beyond, i.e., exoplanets and their solar systems. In today’s interview we’ll be focusing mainly on the theory of the Big Bang, black holes, and the possible implications of new observational data recently made available by...

Reuben Last has been a general surgeon for over 20 years at the Albuquerque Veteran’s Administration Medical Center. We’ll hear about the diverse experiences and family background that led to his career choices, as well as his insights into the history of medicine and the current conditions for health professionals. Reuben has made good use of his multifaceted skills and passions in helping to cre...

Ricardo Nuila is a writer, physician, and professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where he teaches the practice of hospital medicine and directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab. The son of Salvadoran immigrants and a native Houstonian, Ricardo has worked as an attending physician in the city’s largest safety-net facility, Ben Taub Hospita...

Peter Frankopan is a Professor of Global History at Oxford University with comprehensively wide-ranging interests, including the history and politics of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, ancient Persia and modern Iran, Central Asia, and China. Peter often writes for the international press and is the author of  The First Crusade: The Call from the East ,  The Silk Roa...

Jonathan Reisman is a doctor of internal medicine, pediatrics, and emergency medicine, who recently published his first book,  The Unseen Body: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy . With the excitement of an explorer, the book recounts his hard-won medical knowledge with the flair of a poet, the attention to narrative detail of a journalist, the adroitness of s...

Stuart Kelter interviews Las Crucen, Ron Lautenbach, about his experiences of, and life lessons in, climbing Everest and Denali (McKinley). With humor and insight, he conveys his penchant for adventure and intensity, his reverence for nature and faith in a higher power, his love and respect for people, and his hard-won wisdom to take measured risks that included possible death as part of the equat...

Kevin Elliott is a philosophy professor at Michigan State University, who studies the role of values in science and the ethical issues related to science and technology, such as conflicts of interest involving environmental pollution and financial stakes in research. He also collaborates with environmental scientists at the European Food Safety Authority and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences....

Martin Wolf is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator at  The Financial Times , London. He has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award. He was a member of the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking in 2010–11. The Wikipedia entry on Wolf notes that he is widely regarded as one of the most influential economics journalists in the world.&nbs...

Amy Gajda is a professor of law at Tulane Law School, a former journalist, and a nationally recognized expert in the topic of privacy and the media. She was an award-winning legal commentator on Illinois public radio stations, has written for the NY Times and Slate, and has provided commentary for several prominent print and television news media. Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals i...

Naomi Oreskes is a Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and her TED Talk, “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. She is the author of several books on the intersection between politics...

Sarah Fay is a professor at DePaul and Northwestern Universities, a critic, scholar, and creative writer. Her writing has appeared in many publications including  The New York Times ,  The Atlantic , and  Time , as well as many literary publications such as  Bookforum ,  BOMB , and  The Paris Review,  where she served as an advisory editor. She is the recipient o...

Leah Hazard  is an American-Scottish midwife and author, whose recent book is entitled,  Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began . Leah graduated from Harvard University, working in print journalism and television before the births of her two daughters prompted her to change direction. She is now a practicing NHS midwife in Scotland and has worked in a wide variety of clinical...

Stephen Grossberg  is one of the principal founders of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and artificial neural network research. At Boston University he has been Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems since 1989, founder of the Center for Adaptive Systems since 1981, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Psycholog...

Loren Williams is a biophysicist, biochemist, astrobiologist, and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His research passions include the structural basis for macromolecular reactions, from the role of nucleic acids as targets of chemotherapeutics to the ancestral bio­chemistry of the riboso...

Natalie Hodges is both a writer and a classical violinist. Born and raised in Denver and currently living in Boulder, Colorado, she has performed throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. She graduated from Harvard University, where she studied English and music. Her recently published fi...

Ca​milla Townsend is a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, whose scholarship focuses on indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and in the relations between natives and newcomers. She is deeply immersed in the study of Nahuatl, the Aztec language, particularly the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings left to us by Native American historians. Through the historical a...

Barry Krakow, MD , is a board certified internist, sleep medicine specialist, and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Mercer University School of Medicine in Savannah, Georgia, having earlier established a sleep clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his 30+ years in the field, he has pioneered innovative techniques for the treatment of chronic nightmares, chronic and complex insomnia,...

Jack Shlachter is a Ph. D. physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for over three decades, also at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, as well as two organizations based in Vienna, Austria: the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Dr. Shlachter's training was as an experimentalist creating and diagnosing p...

Fyodor Urnov is a Professor of Molecular Therapeutics at UC Berkeley and a Scientific Director at its  Innovative Genomics Institute . He co-developed the toolbox of human genome and epigenome editing and led the team that developed a strategy for genome editing in the hemoglobinopathies, sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, that has yielded sustained clinical benefit for subjects in sev...

Jay Wellons MD, MSPH is a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic Surgery, Radiology, and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and University. He is Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery and Vice Chair of the Departments of Neurological Surgery and the Section of Surgical Sciences. He also co-founded and directs SOCKs, the Surgic...

“Jack” Wright (legal name “John Wright”) is a Regents Professor in the Department of Geography at New Mexico State University (NMSU), whose research encompasses land conservation, cultural geography, and environmental planning. He helped found and served as Chair of the  New Mexico Land Conservancy  (NMLC) from 2003-2012 and recently returned to it is board. He is the co-author of ...