Lady Scientist Podcast

“Science can only progress if others are able to read and build off of what has been learned in the past.” Jessica Polka shares this insight and many more in this conversation with LSP about the current state of scientific publishing. As the executive director of ASAPbio, an organization battling the slowing of the sharing of scientific knowledge, she’s played a key role in catalyzing change when...

Dr. Vega Shah was was like a gold miner during her undergraduate and graduate school studies, except instead of panning for gold, she was searching the metagenomes of ocean samples for new life and new metabolic functions. What she found was a new species of ocean bacteria, but she also realized that the software tools she relied on and the databases she used to answer her research questions were...

Scientist & entrepreneur, Dr. Erandi De Silva, grew up in the small country of Botswana, where she lived through an HIV epidemic. Seeing scientists and epidemiologists having a direct translational impact on public health inspired her to pursue a career in science. She immigrated to the US to go to college, and went on to get her PhD and did an industry postdoc at Genentech before founding For...

In this episode of Lady Scientist Podcast, Dr. Jocelynn Pearl hosts Emily McGinnis, Chief of Patient Advocacy at Taysha Gene Therapies, and Claire Aldridge, Chief Strategy Officer at Form Bio (spun out of Colossal Biosciences - the company that wants to de-extinct the dodo bird!) Together, we discuss challenges and advancements in gene therapy for rare diseases, emphasizing patient advocacy in dru...

Dr. Madeleine Oudin knew she was interested in medicine and biology from a young age. She took a science track of courses in high school in France and went on to do her undergraduate studies at McGill University. Despite a lack of advising, she found that she loved research and continued on to get a Masters and PhD in neuroscience. She shifted gears in her postdoc, studying cancer and tumor biolog...

Today we’re joined by another awesome scientist, Dr. Christine Cucinotta. Christine studies gene regulation in yeast in her postdoctoral studies in the Tsukiyama Lab at the Fred Hutch. She also organizes Fragile Nucleosome, a Discord community of scientists and researchers that puts on a seminar series (available to watch on YouTube). We chat about the importance of community in science and what s...

In today’s episode of Lady Scientist Podcast, Jocelynn chats with Yolanda Hagar, Associate Director of Bioinformatics and Clare Paterson, Director of Clinical Research, both at SomaLogic. Somalogic was founded in 2000 with the goal of improving the well-being and quality of life of every individual by transforming how diseases were detected, diagnosed and managed. Built on decades of aptamer resea...

Kathy Lee-Sepsick founded Femasys, a women’s health technology company, 18 years ago. Since then, she’s been the primary leader and inventor behind the company’s expansive patent portfolio and is dedicated to minimally invasive technology that can improve options for infertility. From the Femasys website, more than 9 million women contend with infertility in the US, and innovation in this medical...

Research suggests that diabetes affects men and women quite differently! But did you know that the current standard treatment for type 2 diabetes is exactly the same for both men and women? Well, today’s guest Dr. Stacey Gorniak is on a mission to change that! Listen in as she dives into the key findings her research group has uncovered surrounding sex-based differences in diabetes. Plus, hear abo...

Meet Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and author of Viral , a book she co-wrote with renowned science writer Matt Ridley, where they go on the hunt for the origin of COVID-19. The book is educational and at times shocking, covering everything from pangolins and horseshoe bats to internet sleuths and misleading scientific papers. Alina is also a postdoc fellow at the Broad Institute, a biomedi...

Today, we’re sitting down with Ryan Brown, a psychology Ph. D. student from Rice University. She studies how relationships help people navigate stress during and after pregnancy and has published a study entitled “Anything He Can Do, She Can Do Better: Children's Attitudes About Gender And Occupations” on gendered media messages and their implications. She also shares her love and passion for scie...

Meet Dr. Kiana Aran – recent winner of Nature's Award for Inspiring Women in Science and the brain behind The CRISPR-Chip™, also known as the DNA Search Engine as it can search through whole genomes in minutes, with no cost of expensive lab reagents and no amplification errors. Kiana is also an Associate Professor at KGI where she runs her academic research lab www.aranlab.org. On this episode of...

Meet Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech startup developing drugs to extend dog lifespan. In this episode of Lady Scientist Podcast, Celine reveals how a single cold email landed her an internship and then later a full-time job with the Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco. This was the career shift that launched her into the biotech space where she later f...

Five years ago, Lindsay could not have predicted she would one day found a biotech. Fast forward to today where she's cofounded Talus Bio and is leading technology development as CTO. We get into the nitty gritty of cold-emailing investors, fundraising over zoom, and founder relationships in this interview. Links for Lindsay: https://www.talus.bio/ https://twitter.com/lkpino https://www.linkedin.c...

In this special episode of LSP, we sit down with not one but two women from the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies - Public Benefit Corporation (MAPS PBC), where they study the use of MDMA and psilocybin to treat mental health disorders. Allison Coker, PhD is trained in neuroscience and is the regulatory affairs manager. She shares the intricacies of their latest, groundbreaking...

Kanaka Rajan, Ph. D. is a Computational Neuroscientist and Assistant Professor at the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai in New York. Her research seeks to understand how the brain functions; how it learns or makes decisions. We dive into Dr. Rajan's approaches these brain 'themes' in this interview. She also walks us through the contrasts between the fields of neurobiology and artificial int...

Shon joined the cancer therapy field a little later than most. She was older than her graduate school peers, where she studied the dynamics of cancer in mouse models with Dr. Martin McMahon. After getting her PhD, she felt an urgency to dive into industry and apply her knowledge to something that could have a real impact on the lives of cancer patients. But her first application to the company she...

Lexi Walls set out to investigate coronaviruses back in 2015 when little was known about these large viruses and the spike protein that they use to gain entry into host cells. She was among the first to solve the structure of the spike protein using a technique called cryo electron microscopy. She defended her thesis (in which she predicted that coronaviruses had the potential to cause a pandemic)...

Nikhita Singh has had a fascinating career thus far. She once led product design at Palantir and demo'd robots as part of her research at MIT Media Lab, experience that led to her co-founding and leading product development at new startup Artificial Inc. In this episode we get into some of the interesting side projects she's worked on along the way (city boxes? and have you seen her notebooks?). W...

Christina was named Endpoints 20 under 40 for 2021 (article link: https://endpts.com/the-201-under-40-i... ​). She's a serial biotech entrepreneur who has been a driving force behind the creation of several new companies in the biotech space over the last few years. She studied at Copenhagen University and UC Berkeley before using her adept networking skills and 'Stay Hungry' attitude to break int...

Dr. Caitlin Vander Weele is a neuroscientist and the founder and CEO of Stellate Communications, a science-first public relations agency. Caitlin studied brain pathways involved in motivated behaviors at MIT. During her PhD, she founded Interstellate - a neuroscience and art magazine that leverages research images for science education. She is an active advocate for alternative careers for scienti...

I decided to update our listeners about how things are going and what to look forward to in the future on Lady Scientist Podcast. We've got a newsletter on our website, an upcoming interview with a neuroscientist, and swag (if you want it). Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far! Now back to building a biotech :)

Casey's 'mind was blown' (her words!) one day when she learned in her high school science class that a cellular function they were studying worked via an 'unknown mechanism.' She decided then and there that she wanted to study science. Casey went on to work in a lab washing glassware (how many of us got our start!) before studying signal transduction during her graduate school work. During her pos...

Franziska's mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was young. She wanted to understand more about her mother's disease, but what she found left her with more questions than answers. This led her to a career in scientific research and in particular, the study of proteins. During her graduate school research at Berkeley, she crystallized a protein dimer in groundbreaking work. After g...

Amal Katrib studied biomedical physics and computational biology for her Ph. D. from UCLA. She went on to learn about women's health during her postdoc at the Institute for Systems Biology. Now she's blazing her own trail; she founded a telemedicine platform to virtually connect doctors to Syrian refugees and other marginalized communities (eSAHA) and she's writing a book about how to understand h...