Happy Pride month. Everybody. June feels like it's the month for all the celebration Fride. June teenth is this month. Yes, it's black music month. It just feels like June is just full of joy, and it feels like it's really summer. That's when summer officially starts. Yes, June's that girl.
It really is the perfect time for celebration, and we're continuing the celebration right here on Dope Labs, celebrating all of our LGBTQ plus friends and family in stem. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy do friendship.
In the United States and many places around the world, June is when we celebrate Pride Month. In the lgbtqia plus community.
So lgbtqia plus encompasses a lot of different identities in the queer community. It stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, or ally depending on who you ask. Identity is complicated and these words don't mean the same thing to every person. The meaning of some of these words have changed over time. Queer in the beginning was used to be a slur but has been reclaimed today as a way for many people to celebrate their sexuality, and we are so excited
to celebrate Pride Month on the show. Yes, and for this lab, we wanted to hear perspectives from queer voices in science, so.
We've reached out and y'all gave us some awesome clips on what you're doing.
And if you've been following Dope Blast for a while, you might recognize this type of lab. We took a similar approach and we did the Black Scientist since them Black History Month back in twenty twenty.
Yes, visibility in any field, including stem is crucial, and this is also a time for us to celebrate, you know how far queer rights have come, especially in the face of efforts to roll those rights back, and for us to take a critical look at what we still have left to do. This episode, we're going to hear from some queer scientists about their research, passion projects, and why they love science.
We only have thirty minutes and so we couldn't get to everybody, but we were so happy to hear from so many of you about your work.
But before we hear from all these brilliant scientists, let's rewind a little bit to get some context around Pride and why career representation in STEM is so important.
While there have always been efforts for gay rights, Pride Month was sparked by the Stonewall Riots also known as the Stonewall Uprisings, and this was in June of nineteen sixty nine when police raided the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village in New York and at the time, cops will routinely arrest queer people for just being outside in public living their lives.
Very similar to what we saw with Black Lives Matter. We saw a space that was considered safe for gay and queer people in New York, right, this was their bar, and what would have been a minor infraction a liquor
license charge, becomes people getting abused, beat up, harassed. So we see increased police violence to something that is a nonviolent offense, which is not a new tactic for the police, right, and this isn't the first time that the queer community stood up against that type of police violence, but it was kind of considered the hairpin drop herd around the world, and that everybody kind of getting involved, and the huge response to this one event is what led to the
creation of Pride Month, which we continue to celebrate now. All right, So now that we have a little bit of history, let's get into the recitation. All right, So what do we know? Well, we know that there's been a lot of progress in the year since Stonewall, but don't get it twisted. There's a long way to go, and there's particularly a long way to go in STEM too, And we know that STEM as a whole is advanced by having diversity of thought, diversity of experience, all of
these unique characteristics of each person help advance science. The things we've seen pop up in our labs with doctors Barbara Hofer and Gail Sinatra, our HIV episode with doctor Christine Daniels, and our episode about racism and Science with doctor Angelo sani is that science is not done in a vacuum, right, and people bring their whole selves to science, and so the variety of experience also informs what gets pursued in the sciences, what's deemed as worthy of research,
in which communities we prioritize. To make our technology and scientific advances work on behalf.
Of right and to create these environments where you can have that type of robust science. You have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and representation matters. If you can see it, you can be it. So that's what we hope to do today, highlighting queer folks in STEM. So what do we want to know?
Well, we want to hear from our LGBTQ plus community in STEM, right, we want to know what they're working on.
Yes, and I would love to hear their experiences, their personal experiences about what it's like being in STEM. You and I have a unique perspective as black women in STEM and our experiences, but it's always good to know where other people feel like there are pitfalls that we might not be aware of.
Absolutely, let's jump into the dissections.
We put a call out to hear from our queer friends that are in STEM to find out more about the things that you all are loving, the work that you're doing, where you are in your career, and the things that are important to you. And we got so many responses and made it so happy.
Our first caller is.
An astronomer who studies tides on stars. We love talking about space because there's so much that's always being learned every single day. Space in the ocean. I mean, give me a break, there's no limit.
Ktt and zakiya. I'm currently standing in the sand in ancestral wee Be Territory on the central California coast under the moonlight. My name is Rewa, I use she her pronouns, and this fall I will be starting graduate school for astronomy. Anyone who's been to the ocean knows about tides, right.
The water level rises and falls because the Moon's gravity pulls on the Earth's ocean, and turns out, tides can happen on stars too, especially if that star veers super close to a very very dense object like a super massive black hole. So that's what I study. I use the lux supercomputer at UC Santa Cruz to run simulations of tightly disrupted stars, trying to find any telltale fingerprints so that we know how to go look for them
in the wild. I love the feeling of wonder as I explore phenomena so much vaster than my imagination can hold. And I love the people I work with, people who are invested in making stem spaces that are decolonial, feminist, anti racist, that we can all participate in as our full selves.
Ooh, you know, when I start thinking about space, it makes me feel like we're so small ificant. Yes, and Raya is talking about tidal disruptions in space.
Yeah.
So, just like how the Moon interacts with the Earth and how it pulls its hides in the ocean, that's exactly what Raywa is saying is happening with stars. As stars get close to a dense object like a black hole, they also feel that tidle pull. And you know, that's kind of like what happens in the beginning part. But if stars get too close to that dense object, too close to that black hole, then you have a catastrophic event.
Yes, that is so cool. I didn't even think about tides happening on things other than planets, honestly, but it makes sense.
It does make sense that all of these things should have tides. It's a lot going on in space.
Yes, And you know, anytime I can tie something back to some biology, I'm game for it. Did you hear her say star fingerprinting?
I did. I did.
And so just like our fingerprints are supposed to be, you know, unique to us and help you identify individuals, Star fingerprinting is a term for identifying and distinguishing between the millions of stars in the sky. So astronomers like ray Well identify stars color to find out the gas is made of and it's temperature, so its own sort
of finger printing. That's really cool, kind of cool. Yeah, you know, we love space, and we can call back to the Starchlla episode where we talked about space and just how small we all are when we consider the grand scale of you know, just the Earth to the Moon, but that's just our little planet and what's orbiting around it. Then we start thinking about orbiting around the Sun, and that's just our little solar system, and solar system is
in the galaxy. Girl, it's too much. But we still celebrate astronomers because they're able to take all that in. And you know another type of scientists I really celebrate. But I know it's not for me. What an entomologist.
Oh that's my friend's worst nightmare. Entomologists study insects.
It's no for me.
Dog Listen.
I have had to rescue my friend a number of times from a variety of insects, and I'll be there every time. But this is a real fear. Do you think you ever could have been an entomologist or what if, like your research like veered that direction a little.
Bit couldn't have. I don't even like when people call bacteria bugs. Oh just the worst, Yeah, because they're not a but b I don't want to think about them having little legs. You know, cilia and flagella. That's fine, but little insect legs. No, no, no, So clearly entomology is not for you. But our next caller, doctor Perry Beasley Hall, is someone who loves bugs.
Hi. Everyone, my name's doctor Perry Beasley Hall, and I'm a researcher at the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide. Here in Australia, I use she, her or they then pronouns. I'm a lesbian biologist and I'm passionate about increasing the visibility of LGBTQ people in stem fields. At the moment, I'm working on cataloging the biodiversity in mini oases of the South Australian Desert also called mound springs. But my background is in entomology, the study of insects
and evolutionary biology. Much of my work focuses on untangling the insect tree of Life using DNA. I have a particular interest in subterranean or underground insects because of the weird adaptations they often have to face the challenges of a complete dark environment, cut off from the world. I'm passionate about the work I do because I love solving evolutionary puzzles and figuring out which species go where when
it comes to an evolutionary trait. My job allows me to turn people into defenders of insects and show them some fascinating animals they've never seen before.
I Ritzekiah, has doctor Beasley Hall turned you into a defender of insects. I understand the importance of insects, and I defend them away from me, right like that is where I am the strongest defender.
Then go buggy over there, over there, and you know, but I do think the work that doctor Beasley Hall is doing right now, you know, documenting biodiversity in the South Australian desert, that type of work is incredibly important because, whether I like it or not, insects are vital to our world and many insect populations are going extinct at alarming rates.
Right and we just had a lab all about that conversation on biodiversity with doctor raywind Grant, we talked about how important data collection is for conservation.
Yeah, and insects are a part of that. But you know, what we realize is that there's a huge lack of data on insects, and so we're losing them, but we don't even know that we're losing them. What did Shannon Sharp say, we're losing recipes and so. And I recently saw in somebody's yard where they had a sign that said don't do those mosquito treatments because they affect other
flying bugs and other pollinators that are really important. And a recent study from the UK show that they had a sixty percent drop in flying bugs from two thousand and four to twenty twenty two.
Wow, that's crazy.
I'm like, that sounds good for me as a person outside, but I know that's not good for our environment. We were already under the biology umbrella, so let's stay under there a little bit, but shift to neuroscience, studying the brain. Our next caller is Kayla Singleton, a neuroscientist who researches Minky's disease.
Hello, my name is doctor Kayla as Singleton. My pronouncer she Her. I'm a black, Samoan and queer developmental neuroscientist and I'm a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm from grace And Georgia, and my current research focuses on understanding how the brain develops in normal and pathological
conditions by studying rare genetic diseases, specifically Minky's disease. My current project is funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke and what it really tries to understand is how copper affects brain development, but also how copper effects mitochondrial function and metabolic function. Most of the research that I do relies on convocal microscopy. It relies on using Drosophla or fruitfly, as well as cell lines as
a model. And one of the reasons that I love my research so much is because it has direct implications to help the Minky's disease population. Another reason that I love my work is because I get to mentor and teach and train the next upcoming generation of scientists, and I think that that's really wonderful.
Doctor Singleton's work has implications for people who have mincus disease and that leads to the deterioration of the nervous system, and that's directly related to copper in the body.
And the result of that is you'd have sparse or kinky hair textures, difficulty gaining weight, weak muscle tone, sagging facial features, seizures, developmental delay, and an intellectual disability.
And all of this is related to copper levels in the body. You know, I think we've kind of touched on some of these things in LA labs. So when we talked about nutrition earlier back in January that lab with doctor Lickenstein, and then more recently our episode with doctor Buttner where we talked about metals and their importance in different developmental stages. Here we're seeing that exact same thing.
This is such important work that will help a lot lot of people that are struggling with this disease.
Absolutely T T. Let's take a break and when we get back we'll hear some more from queer scientists.
We're back and we're celebrating Pride Month in STEM and listening to queer scientists share their research stories and experiences.
Not only is June Pride month, but it's also Black Music Month, and next week we're talking all about it with Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder. This lab is going to be great and I can't wait for you guys to listen. Let's get back to today's lab.
So far we've heard from an astronomer studying tides on stars, and entomologists exploring biodiversity in the Australian desert, and a neurobiologist who's working to address Minky's disease.
Our next caller is a biochemist who is studying an unstoppable force.
Aging dope lapse podcast What's Good? So, I am doctor Melanie mcrennolds, she her hers. I am originally from Louisville, Mississippi. I'm a biochemist. I study the biochemistry of aging, right, so the intersection of metabolic decline and really asking those questions of how can we age healthier? How can we protect the resiliency of my metabolism In particular, I'm an NAD scientist. So nicotinamie editing NIE nucleotide. It's a key
reados regulator. It drives energy production, but it also controls a lot of signaling processes.
So doctor McReynolds might not be working to create the Fountain of Youth, but her work is central to finding ways for people to have a better quality of life as they age. Her work is on NAD, which is nicotinamide at need di nucleotide. It's a molecule that supports cellular function across a couple of different categories. So think metabolism, DNA damage repair, gene expression, stress responses. These are some things we've talked about in earlier episodes, and this signaling
molecule she studies is involved in all of them. When we age, our body produces less in AD and it also uses more of it, so now we're getting into supply and demand. Those declines can lead to a lot of diseases associated with getting older, like cancer and cognitive decline.
There's been a lot of hype over the years about anti aging supplements, but it's scientists like doctor McReynolds who are doing the work to tease apart these really complex systems to understand how to help people as they age.
In the same vein of ensuring the quality of life for folks, there are scientists that look at specific diseases and do a ton of research on what factors may be causing certain groups to have a lower quality of.
Life, and this is disparities. We've talked about disparities across a couple of topics including sleep, housing, healthcare, you name it.
Our next caller is a med student who hopes to help patients with HIV who are also experiencing another serious condition.
Hi.
There, my name is Derek Trim. I'm going to be a first year medical student of coming out this summer and I'm currently doing a research project on patients with HIV and a depression commobidity and how different type of interventions can hopefully have the house in the future.
The work that Derek is doing is so important, and when you consider what we know, which is that nothing happens really in isolation. So a comorbidity is the presence of one or more conditions in addition to the primary condition you're being treated for. So, in the case is that Derek is studying or hoping to help out with, the primary condition is HIV and the comorbidity they're interested in is depression.
Yeah, if you're sick or dealing with an illness that can create or exacerbate other things. And of course mental health is just as important. As physical health. The work that Derek is doing and will probably continue to do
after they achieve their medical degree is so important. If we think back to what doctor Christine Daniels was telling us from our HIV episodes, it is very important to have resources available to folks that are living with HIV in order to ensure that they are having a high quality of life.
One of the things that we've talked about TT is the experience that individuals have going through the STEM pipeline of training and postdoc training and then being in their fields. And we heard from scientists who both have felt confined or like they can't be them full selves in their field and folks who are studying people having those experiences.
So we gotta voice memo. I'm a civil engineer named Albert who reflected on what it means to be queer and working in engineering.
Hi, this is Albert, and I live in Austin. I work in civil engineering slash construction management, so it kind of science last math here in Austin.
And you know, I grew.
Up being a want to be a tear, but the engineering world is as it is. It's very very anti feminine energy, if that makes sense. I don't know that's going to be like in other types of field, but for me, that's how I feel. You have to have this masculine approach and how you dress, how you talk, how you pretty much carry yourself.
It's a side of me that I have to.
Show up at work looking very.
Masculine, because I do have a side of me that I tend to show differently with my friends that are in the LGBTQ plus community, but not that I'm.
Comfortable to show in my workplace for my colleagues and the civil and construction work here in Austin. I've always wondered how much of a mental toll that takes for me. I know some friends that have come out in their workplace, but to me, that's something that I have to work on and I had to kind of guard my heart on that.
That's such an important point that Albert made about the mental toll of hiding a part of yourself and having to think about what you feel comfortable or safe telling people about, and then you have to kind of consider what does it take to kind of box yourself in for one part of a day then try to retrieve that part of you for the rest of it. Exactly.
And there are people who never have to think about these things. They move through their jobs, through life and just are themselves. And there are folks that have to constantly be policing themselves, like self policing and correcting and saying, oh, let me not say this this way, let me not dress this way, let me not talk in this certain way, let me not talk about my experiences. Or if somebody says, how is your weekend, Oh, I can't tell them what I was doing because it is unique to my culture,
as unique to who I am as a person. And you feel like, oh, they may treat me differently. All of that psychology, all of those mental gymnastics that you have to go through in order to just feel like you are fitting in quote unquote and so that people won't mistreat you is exhausting.
Yeah, the stem fill has a lot of room to grow so that everyone can show up as their full selves. One of the people that we heard from works on this very issue. Let's turn it over to doctor Barthelmy.
I'm doctor Raman Barthelmi, and I'm an assistant professor of physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah. I am a physics education researcher conducting studies on the lives, experiences, and careertories of LGBT plus physicists with a strong intersectional focus on physicists who also might be people of color
or women. Currently, I am working on a social network analysis project to understand how LGBT plus physicists at the intersections of gender and race build and navigate their professional networks to successfully launch and continue in their careers. This is important knowledge to understand in order to support graduate students and building robust and strong networks early in their educations in order to find whatever their definition of successes
within their field. As a physicist, I truly believe that this is a science that everybody can learn about and enjoy, and I hope that I can improve it in some small way.
I love what doctor Bartholomy had to say, and I know that they said that they were going to be improving the space in a small way. But those small changes make a big difference in a lot of people's lives. And just like all of the work that we've heard today, these are all advances in spaces that are going to have a large impact.
We've heard from so many wonderful scientists today, you know, and they're doing amazing work. They're making the feel better. Like why would you want to exclude these folks?
I know, I mean when you think about what is missed out on when people are trying to deny folks access to any type of community. But I'm having more diverse populations within STEM and in every field. It creates better product, it creates more advancements, and it also creates an environment where more folks feel like they can be a part of it.
Yeah, this lapl was all about amplifying queer voices. We heard about astronomy, neuroscience, biodiversity, and entomology. I mean we heard about it all.
Right, and that is just a small taste of where the queer community has impact. I feel like there are so many resources online for you to learn more about queer scientists and the work that they're doing. Like there's an organization called five hundred Queer Science, and it provides lists of queer people who are involved in STEM. But then they also have a lot of studies that lets you know some of the work that's being done and where we still need to make improvements.
And I think the thing to remember is with organizations like five hundred Queer Scientists, or when you get on social media like Twitter and Instagram where you're looking at hashtag LGBTQ and STEM or LGBT and STEM. All of these folks are doing the hard work of making STEM better. And for all these people that you see, there are people who aren't in these fields today because they were hostile or exclusionary or you know, not nurturing folks that
feel just a little different from them. So I think it's important to acknowledge that, and I think the people that are still there weren't necessarily nurtured either, So we have to really address, you know, the toll. You know that everybody's like, oh, be resilient and stay persistent, be persistent, right, Like those things have a cost, right, It's not just resilience, Oh, I'm going to show up here, exactly, even when I'm tired. It is sometimes showing up in places where my whole
identity in person are not welcome. Exactly.
The whole idea of being resilient and persisting is something that is exclusive to people in marginalized communities. People from the majority don't have to be resilient, don't have to persist they are allowed to be themselves in every single space, and that should be par for the course for everyone.
We should be able to show up.
As we are, be who we are, and make the impacts that we know that we can make on every single space. And as much as we celebrate, you know how far we've come and how far things have changed, we also have to pay attention to the rollback of rights right so that don't say gay Bill in Florida, well started in Florida and now spreading to these other states, and the potential of New Jersey proposing some build that's even worse than the one in Florida.
Like, there's a lot.
To pay attention to, and just hope we you know, STEM doesn't become a field that's just paying lip service right to the marginalized communities.
Honestly, because sometimes it just is, you know, in vogue for folks to say that they stand with the LGBTQIA plus community, to put up the flag, to say, oh, yes we're inclusive, but then they aren't really actually doing the work. So you see the rainbows in June, you see different corporations highlighting their queer employees, but then after June, it kind of stops, and what we want to show is that you have to continue that work outside of
Pride Month. You have to continue the amplification of queer people of queer identities outside of June because they exist three hundred and sixty five days a year.
That's it for LAP sixty six.
I am so grateful for the people who called in and share their story, share their work with us. Do you have something you want to share? Do you have an idea for a lab? Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight. We really want to hear from you, so you can call ortex at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.
And don't forget that there is so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheat cheat for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks to everyone that called in. We are so excited about the work that you are doing and will be doing in the future. Thank you so much. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast.
TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho.
And you can find Zakia at z said. So Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Ownmedia Group.
Our producers are Jenny Ratlimask and Lydia Smith of WaveRunner Studios. Our associate producer from Mega Ohmedia is Brianna Garrett.
Editing in sound design by Rob Smercy, mixing by Hannes Brown. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Executive producer Corin Gilliard and creative producer Miguel Contreras.
Special thanks to Shirley Ramos, Jess Borrison, Jasmine Afifikamu, Elolia, Till krat Key and Brian Marquis. Executive producers from Mega Oh Media Group are us T T show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.