People Behind the Science Podcast Stories from Scientists about Science, Life, Research, and Science Careers

Gregory Krug is Founder, President, and CEO of Lampire Biological Laboratories, a biotech life science company that produces biological reagents used in the diagnostic and pharmaceutical industries. Greg and the team at Lampire Biological Laboratories supply biologic reagents and raw materials for the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and diagnostic industries. Their products are shipped worldwide, a...

Dr. Sapna Sharma is an Associate Professor in Biology at York University. Sapna studies the effects of climate change, invasive species, and pollution on lakes. She is investigating how these effects are manifested through water quality, fish populations, water temperatures, and lake ice. With a young, a lot of Sapna's time away from science is spent with her family. It has been fun to go to music...

Dr. Corey Hopkins is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. In his lab, Corey and his team use chemistry to answer the biological questions behind diseases and how to treat them. They make drug-like compounds and test them in biological systems to investigate whether particular proteins are involved in the disease process. They are pa...

Dr. Daniel Goldman is an Associate Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His lab studies how animals like lizards and snakes move around in complex natural environments. They use physics to understand movement and test their hypotheses in robotic systems with the goal of developing robots with greater abilities to navigate complex environments. When he's not doing science, D...

Dr. Adriana San Miguel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. Adriana conducts research using a small roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). They use this model organism to better understand processes such as aging, neurodegeneration, and stress. In particular, Adriana's lab uses engineering tools and...

Dr. Mike Blatt is the Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow and Adjunct Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Mike is a cell biologist and physiologist who studies cells to understand how the parts fit together to accomplish important functions in plants. He is also passionate about electronics, and he has built much of the equipment they use for their work. Mike loves wint...

Dr. David Kaplan is the Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering at Tufts University, a Distinguished University Professor, and Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He also holds faculty appointments in the School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine, and the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical and Biological Engineering. For his research, David looks to nature for sourc...

Dr. Barry Byrne is the Earl and Christy Powell University Chair in Genetics, Associate Chair of Pediatrics, Director of the Powell Gene Therapy Center, and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Florida. He conducts research on neuromuscular diseases which may cause problems such as muscle weakness, uncoordinated movements, difficulty speaking, and hea...

Dr. Alex DiFeliceantonio is an Assistant Professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion School as well as Associate Director of the Center for Health Behaviors Research. Alex's research examines why we eat what we eat in terms of the underlying neuroscience and physiological factors that influence food choice. Diet and food choice have tremendous impacts on health,...

Dr. Tara C. Smith is an Associate Professor in Epidemiology at Kent State University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Iowa. She works with bacteria that can be transferred between animals and people, and she often studies antibiotic-resistant bacteria. When not working, Tara spends a lot of time with her family, and is often driving her kids to their sports, mus...

Dr. Michele Battle is an Associate Professor of Cell Biology, Neurobiology & Anatomy at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Michele's research is focused on studying how organs in the gut form and function in normal health in order to understand how to fix the gut when things go wrong in different disease states. Outside the lab, she likes spending time with family and friends. Whether she is going...

Dr. Erin E. Carlson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota. Research in Erin's lab focuses on microbes. They are interested in how these organisms interact with one another, humans, and the environment. Over the course of modern medicine, we've come to appreciate that microbes make a lot of potentially important therapeutic agents. In particular, Er...

Dr. Joel Berger is the Barbara Cox Anthony University Chair of Wildlife Conservation at Colorado State University. He is also a longtime Senior Scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the author of multiple books, including most recently Extreme Conservation: Life at the Edges of the World. Joel is dedicated to saving animals that are off the radar of most people such as the Takin in...

Dr. Ohara Augusto is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Institute of Chemistry at the University of São Paulo. In addition, she is the Director of a network studying the redox process in biomedicine. Ohara seeks to understand how free radicals and related oxidants are produced in organisms and how they affect an organism's physiology. Free radicals are continuously produced in or...

Dr. Melik Demirel is a Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at The Pennsylvania State University. Melik is fascinated by complexity in living and nonliving systems. He works at the intersection of biology, materials science, and computational science to understand whether patterns in living and nonliving systems follow mathematical and statistical rules, to determine the underlying physi...

Dr. Rosie Alegado is an Associate Professor of Oceanography and Sea Grant at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa where she is Director for the Center of Ulana ʻIke  Center of Excellence and a member of the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education. She is also Director of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology Maile Mentoring Bridge Program, Chair of the City & County...

Dr. Haley Oliver is an Associate Professor of Food Science at Purdue University, as well as an Adjunct Professor at Texas Tech University. The overall goal of Haley's research is to reduce foodborne disease. She studies bacteria that make people sick and is working to understand where these bacteria may be introduced to food and how they persist on food at every stage of the food system, including...

Dr. Greg Petsko is the Arthur J. Mahon Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience and Director of the Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer's Disease Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College, as well as the Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry, Emeritus, at Brandeis University. Greg is a structural biologist and biochemist by training, but he has entered into a new research field wher...

Dr. Neil Kelleher is the Walter and Mary Elizabeth Glass Professor of Chemistry, Molecular Biosciences, and Medicine at Northwestern University. Neil is a protein biochemist. He weighs and analyzes proteins found in the human body, and he develops technology that allows scientists to measure new things. When he's not doing science, Neil likes to play basketball, and he has also been an avid golfer...

Dr. David Stern is the President of the Boyce Thompson Institute and Adjunct Professor in the Plant Biology Section at Cornell University. He and his colleagues study how plants use light to make the basic building blocks of life through photosynthesis. He also has a leadership role running a plant research institute that focuses on addressing society's need to have a stable supply of food by bett...

Dr. Tamara Bogdanović is an Assistant Professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics, as well as a member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. She is a theoretical physicist who studies some of the largest black holes in our universe, known as supermassive black holes. She investigates observational signatures associated with the interactions these supermassive black ho...

Dr. Thomas Brück is the Werner Siemens Chair of Synthetic Biotechnology at the Technical University of Munich in the School of Natural Sciences. Thomas uses biotechnology methods to more efficiently bind CO2 from the atmosphere using plants and algae, and he also creates value-added products from biomass that we can use in daily life. Some examples are carbon fiber materials that can be used in pr...

Dr. Gemma Reguera is an Associate Professor in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, as well as Plant, Soil, and Microbial Science at Michigan State University. She studies bacteria that help us by cleaning up wastes and pollution. She learns about what these organisms do in the environment, figures out which ones can be brought into the lab, and finds ways to use these microbes to solve real-world...

Dr. Madhur Anand is a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph. She is an ecologist who examines the impacts of global ecological changes on ecosystems. This includes studying how things like climate change, pollution, invasive species, and land use changes affect biodiversity, ecosystem services, ecosystem functioning, and ecosystem stability. When she's not w...

Dr. Joshua Pate is a Lecturer in Physiotherapy at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. He is also a pain researcher, Children's book author, and co-founder of One Thing, a video platform where pain experts share key insights that can help people with pain. Many people don't realize that chronic pain is relatively common in children. Josh studies how kids think about pain and how that...