Socializing with Scientists

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Socializing with Scientists

Rachael Moeller Gorman

23 episodes

17 hours ago

Case was a regular California kid: he skateboarded, he surfed, and he also liked math. He tried a few different majors in college, but finally found his calling: environmental engineering. He went to graduate school, and a lucky encounter during the first week changed his whole life. Case van Genuchten, PhD, now works for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and just published research showing that arsenic from drinking water waste can be changed into a valuable commodity. He...

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Society & Culture

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Case was a regular California kid: he skateboarded, he surfed, and he also liked math. He tried a few different majors in college, but finally found his calling: environmental engineering. He went to graduate school, and a lucky encounter during the first week changed his whole life. Case van Genuchten, PhD, now works for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and just published research showing that arsenic from drinking water waste can be changed into a valuable commodity. He...

Show more...

Society & Culture

Episodes (20/23)

Socializing with Scientists

Case van Genuchten turns arsenic waste into a valuable raw material (he's an environmental engineer)

Case was a regular California kid: he skateboarded, he surfed, and he also liked math. He tried a few different majors in college, but finally found his calling: environmental engineering. He went to graduate school, and a lucky encounter during the first week changed his whole life. Case van Genuchten, PhD, now works for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and just published research showing that arsenic from drinking water waste can be changed into a valuable commodity. He...

1 day ago

1 hour 12 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Cassia Low Manting observes the brain on music (she's a neuroscientist)

Ever since she was a little girl, Cassia has loved playing the piano. Her mother made sure she had music lessons, and Cassia felt like she was fulfilling her mother's dream learning the instrument. But she also loved science and math, and after her undergrad years she found herself searching for a research field and a graduate program that inspired her. She happened to read a few studies linking neuroscience with music, and was hooked. Now, Cassia Low Manting, PhD, is a neuroscientist a...

1 week ago

49 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Charlotte Stagg reaches deep into the brain using ultrasound (she's a neuroscientist)

Charlie grew up in England, surrounded by books. At age 11, she declared that she wanted to be a research scientist. When she was a teenager, however, she started gravitating towards helping people more directly and went to medical school at age 18. After graduating, though, she realized her heart wasn't in medicine, and a remembered lecture from years earlier on post-stroke brain recovery inspired her to follow her childhood dream of doing research. Charlotte Stagg, MBChB, PhD is now a...

2 weeks ago

55 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Bradley Smith watches dingos, and also Bluey (he's a comparative psychologist)

Bradley grew up in suburban Australia, fascinated by the scientists in movies like Jurassic Park. He also eagerly read biographies and memoirs, and his love of animals and people soon grew into a successful career as a comparative psychologist. Bradley Smith, PhD, now teaches and researches at Central Queensland University in Australia, spending much of his time thinking, learning, and talking about dingoes. Dingoes are controversial creatures in Australia. Bradley explains why this is, how d...

3 weeks ago

56 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Samuel Dicken ponders ultraprocessed food (he's a clinical scientist)

As a child, Samuel enjoyed eating "potato smileys" and "turkey dinosaurs," even though most of his meals were homemade. As he grew up, he played sports and became interested in optimizing his nutrition to improve performance. But his first day on the job at a sports nutrition company convinced him to apply to graduate school to study nutrition, not sell it. Now, Samuel Dicken, PhD, is a research fellow at University College London, studying the foods people eat and how they affect their...

4 weeks ago

51 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Fadi Lakkis is a kidney match-maker (he's a physician scientist)

Fadi Lakkis grew up in Lebanon during a time of political unrest, which led him to perpetually question the world around him. Once he became a nephrologist with a speciality in immunology and transplantation, this questioning pushed him to do better science, as well as approach research from unexpected angles. Now, Fadi Lakkis, MD, is a professor at Stanford University, and he's working to help better match donor's kidneys with the people who need them, as well as determine which immunosuppre...

1 month ago

1 hour 13 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Allison Brager helps soldiers survive, and thrive (she's a U.S. Army neurobiologist and sleep scientist)

Allison grew up during a tumultuous time in a city bruised by crime. Playing sports helped secure a kid's reputation, so she focused on athletics, eventually becoming the first female pole-vaulter in the state of Ohio. Division I universities recruited her (she was also class valedictorian), and she settled into life at an Ivy League college. Then, she started studying sleep. Now, Major Allison Brager, PhD, is a neurobiologist working to keep soldiers safe by understanding their sleep, becaus...

1 month ago

53 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

We have several great episodes in the works! I can't wait to share them, starting in September.

2 months ago

1 minute

Socializing with Scientists

Lidya Yurdum studies whether singing helps babies feel good (she's a social psychologist)

Raised in a bilingual household in Istanbul, Lidya had lots of questions. She was keenly interested in people, and, on top of that, wondered things like, does her personality change when she speaks a different language? This led to her pursuing psychology in college to study human behavior in many different contexts. Now in graduate school at the University of Amsterdam, Lidya Yurdum's fascination with language has led to an interest in music (language "is surprisingly close to music in many ...

3 months ago

52 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Katie Amato wonders what it means to be human (she's a biological anthropologist)

As a child, Katie thrived in her suburban Chicago backyard, reading The Boxcar Children and leading her little brother on adventures. A second grade unit on Jane Goodall cemented her curiosity about primates, and two fantastic high school teachers excited her about biology. But it wasn't until college that she thought science could be a career. Now, Katherine Amato is a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. She studies how humans evolved, looking at their microbiome...

3 months ago

57 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Jenna Alley finds the good in parents (she’s a developmental health psychologist)

Jenna was never really interested in school. She loved theater and the arts, but academically, she struggled. She had dyslexia, and "always felt like I was failing...never thought I was very smart," she said. It wasn't until her sophomore year of college that things started to turn around: she discovered an academic field that truly excited her. Jenna had always been observant - nosy, even - wondering why people behaved the way they behaved, but her undergraduate mentor, David Fre...

4 months ago

55 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Shannon Curry is in charge of a spacecraft orbiting Mars (she’s a planetary scientist)

The first time she looked through a telescope, Shannon lost her breath. A self-proclaimed "science camp kid," she learned early that she wanted to do research, and that space would be her subject. Shannon Curry, Ph.D. is now the director of NASA's MAVEN mission, a spacecraft that has been orbiting Mars since 2014. She and her team at the University of Colorado, Boulder are trying to determine how Mars lost its atmosphere, in order to reveal why all the ancient lakes and rivers on Mars disappe...

4 months ago

36 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Scott MacIvor wants people to enjoy green spaces in cities (he's an urban ecologist)

When he was a child in Kitchener, Ontario, Scott MacIvor would go on urban walks with his mom. He had a bucket, and was allowed to bring home one piece of nature each day: a snake, or a bumblebee, a caterpillar. He loved examining them all. Now Scott is an urban ecologist at the University of Toronto, working to connect people with the nature that's hidden all over the places where humans live, especially cities. He uses drones, thermal imaging, and other cutting edge technologies to study ur...

4 months ago

1 hour 5 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Heather Mefford hunts down unruly genes (she’s a human geneticist)

When she was a kid in Iowa, Heather didn't know what she wanted to be when she grew up. She loved solving problems and adored science and math, and when she went to college, she majored in chemical engineering. Then she had an internship: it soon became clear to her that engineering was not the right career choice. So, after college, she moved to Seattle. Heather worked in a human genetics research lab for a year, and decided to apply to MD/PhD programs. She got in, the physician/resear...

4 months ago

55 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

SUMMER 2025 UPDATE!

The first eight episodes of Socializing with Scientists Season 1 have been a blast! Next Wednesday we'll publish another interview, but this week we're taking a little breather. I wanted to talk about what's coming up, to say thank you to the scientists who have spoken with me, and to tell the listeners who have been tuning in each week how much I appreciate you: There are so many other things you could be doing with your time, the fact that you're lending me your brains for an hour means so ...

5 months ago

6 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Scott Krayenhoff helps hot cities cool off (he's an urban climatologist)

Scott has always been a deep thinker. Dinner table conversations on his family's homestead on Vancouver Island instilled in him a strong environmental ethic, and a love for math and science pushed him to excel in college. But when a professor posed the question, how much cooler would Toronto's summer climate be if half the rooftops were green and plant-based? his imagination took off, and he dove into the field of atmospheric science. Scott Krayenhoff is now an associate professor at the Univ...

5 months ago

1 hour 1 minute

Socializing with Scientists

Jan Gogarten is searching for the next deadly germ (he’s a wildlife disease ecologist)

Jan was born in Germany, but he grew up in the US: his parents moved after Chernobyl, because their lab Geiger counter showed high radiation levels despite being hundreds of miles from the reactor. His parents were scientists, but after high school, Jan wanted to forge his own path. He took random gigs - balcony welder, tree planter. During college, one of his professors suggested he try field research. Jan went to Panama to study electric river fish, and was hooked. "That was sort of m...

5 months ago

48 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Cédric Girard-Buttoz learns the language of chimps (he's an evolutionary biologist)

When he was six years old, Cédric wanted to be Tarzan, following monkeys around the forest and studying their behavior. He has pretty much made his dream come true. Cédric Girard-Buttoz has researched lemurs in Madagascar, macaques in Indonesia, and chimpanzees at the Taï Chimpanzee Project in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, and he has also studied bonobos and great apes. He is an evolutionary biologist at ENES, the bioacoustics research lab at the University of Saint-Etienne, France. Wit...

5 months ago

1 hour 8 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Soumya Acharya conjures up clever new medical gadgets (he's a biomedical engineer)

Soumya has always been a tinkerer and inventor. He cobbled together a homemade radio as a 5th grader in northern India, and soon after that he started an electronics club in his dad's garage. He later graduated from medical school, but couldn’t shake a love of technology, and so he decided to go to graduate school for engineering in the US. He now combines both loves as a biomedical engineer, inventing better medical devices for not only patients in the US, but also those in countries without...

6 months ago

46 minutes

Socializing with Scientists

Desirée Plata wants to keep bad chemicals out of your water (she's an environmental chemist)

When Desirée was little, she'd roam around her grandmother's neighborhood in Maine, "kind of eavesdropping on people," she said. She began to notice a troubling pattern: many of the neighbors, and some of her family members, were suffering from odd neurological conditions and cancers. Desirée began to think that something in the air or water must be causing these illnesses. Desirée Plata, PhD, is now an environmental chemist at MIT studying the fate of chemicals that have escaped into t...

6 months ago

50 minutes