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 Ratcliffe 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; Dr. Malin Parmar from Lund University and Dr. Agnete Kirkeby from the University of Copenhagen. The...
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 genetics and inclusion, biobanks, sequencing of the genomes of newborns, exposomics and more.
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 Communication committee of the Society for Neuroscience.
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 force and full scale. And we should welcome and aggregate and retain every ounce of global talent at ...
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 idea came to her during her pregnancy. She talks about deciding to have children and the reactions of ...
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 Artlist.io .)
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 initiatives there. One of her projects is The Cancer Genome Atlas, co-directed with Dr. Francis Collins. Th...
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 American and from Nature Neuroscience. In this podcast episode, you will hear questions from them and from...
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 Nicolas Robles. (Art: J. Jackson, Music: Nonsense by Raw licensed from artist.io )...
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 Wirtz, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and vice-pro...
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 know exactly what the tools do and about the importance of whitespace. (Art: J. Jackson, Music Freer...
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 Jarvis, Designer, now medical student Mika Futz, Jean Mary Zarate, editor with Nature Neuroscience, music...
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: J. Jackson, Music: Break of Dawn / Anthony Vega licensed from artlist.io.)
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 is about his approach to his sport, how it influences his science, what his sport gives him. And it...
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 Germany. Among other topics, they talk about how the label came to be, how to use it, what's next a...
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 make in small labs. He shared his thoughts about the trend toward pangenomes and graph genomes. And ...
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 Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies. (Art: J. Jackson).The following music was used for thi...
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 scientists face the challenging computational task of stitching together short reads into contiguou...
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 in science as people with disabilities. They face adversity head on with strength, creativity and hum...
Recently, we had the chance to get a sneak-peek of the meeting with the Society for Neuroscience's current leadership and to play a nerdy game with them. They are: Dr. Gina Turrigiano, Brandeis University researcher and current President of the Society for Neuroscience, Dr. Robbie Greene of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, current chair of SfN’s Public Education and Communication Committee and Dr. Damien Fair from the University of Minnesota, incoming chair of SfN’s Public Ed...
This is a podcast series with some of the people I spoke with for a story about the creative grit scientists in The Global South apply in the fight against COVID-19. They collaborate, they network, they get creative to get what they need: supplies and strength for their research. In the haste to clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccines some people were missed who need special attention. Thomas Egwang talks about why he and his colleagues submitted a letter to Nature Immunology about this and ho...
A conversation with sailor-scientist Romain Troublé Tara Ocean Foundation. He is executive director of the foundation devoted to the ocean and ocean research. And there's a connection to the French fashion house agnès b. You have perhaps heard of the gut microbiome, the many microbes in our gut that play a large role in maintaining our health. The ocean microbiome plays a similar role in our planetary health. A massive research effort is underway to better understand the roles the ocean’s microb...
Models are important tools: they resemble, they mimic, they imitate something to a greater or lesser extent. How similar models are to the 'real thing' is usually a challenging issue. And it's a big issue with stem-cell derived models of the human embryo. These embryo models, models of the embryo's 8-cell stage, of the blastocyst or of the gastrula are emerging and they are ones that labs can use to characterize the molecular and physiologic events that take place during early embryogenesis. My ...
I asked Dr. Leo Poon, who co-directs the Hong Kong University Pasteur Research Pole, if he has a fleet of private jets. He does not. But he wishes he did. He and his team have helped colleagues all over the world on COVID-19. He and his team developed a diagnostic assay quite soon after the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 became known. His is the lab that detected and identified SARS, the outbreak in 2003. And many other viruses. Like most science journalists, I rep...
How is the Russian invasion of Ukraine affecting scientists? Here is another episode on this with a conversation with Dr. Svitlana Dekina, a researcher at the A.V. Bogatsky Physico-Chemical Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Odessa, Ukraine. She has recently left Ukraine and is now at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. She is in Germany with her children; her husband is still in Ukraine. It's not easy to talk about staying and leaving but I...
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is affecting scientists in many different ways. Here is a conversation with Dmytro Gospodaryov, a researcher in the department of biochemistry and biotechnology at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, West Ukraine. I spoke to him shortly after the Russian invasion in Ukraine began. And it feels like that was so very long ago. He is ok and safe and still in Ukraine with his family.
Virologist Dr Marycelin Baba from the University of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria is passionate about her work on viruses, She runs a World Health Organization (WHO)-accredited and WHO-sponsored lab where the team has worked, for example, on polio. When COVID-19 emerged, she and her team were prepared and she was called upon to help build capacity in Nigeria to address COVID-19. When the government asked her to certify a lab not up to biosafety levels, she said no. "Even if I was to be kille...
Around three years ago, three children were born with genomes edited before their birth. They are supposedly doing ok, sources tell me. But it's hard to know for sure. Germline-genome editing is not permissible in most countries, but it might one day be performed to avoid heritable diseases that are incurable. But the technology needs to be much more precise than it is now. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Alison van Eenennaam of the University of California, David about her work in cattle and ...
