“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 it comes to how and when scientific articles are shared. We dive into the White House memo calling for all scientific papers to be open access by 2025, what some of her key concerns are for the space ..read more

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 anything but solid. After grad school, she shifted her career to building software for biologists at Dotmatics, integrating tools such as Prism into electronic lab notebooks. Today she’s a program man ..read more

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 Forge Biologics. In this episode, we discuss what it's like running a company that has both a 'platform' in the sense that they are a CDMO - they make AAV products for other companies, and a 'product'; t ..read more

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 biology, and was surprised to learn of some of the overlaps with studying neuroscience. These two fields merged to form her research niche when she founded her own lab at Tufts University. But her research ..read more

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 she considers to be groundbreaking work in the field of gene regulation in the last decade. We also get into how she felt about the recent eLife decision to publish preprints (hint - she’s a fan of cha ..read more

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 research, SomaLogic scientists developed a ground-breaking proteomics technology that overcomes the significant challenges of existing protein measurements. Clare and Yolanda share their career journeys an ..read more

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 area has been relatively stagnant for 30 years. We dive into Kathy’s career path, leadership style, and observations in the women’s health space over the course of her career. An inspiring conversatio ..read more

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 about her journey to becoming an associate professor and catch her best tips for early career researchers and postdocs who are considering a career in academia! You can connect with Stacey on Twitter @Pr ..read more

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 biomedical and genomic research center that evolved from research collaborations among MIT and Harvard scientists. In this episode of the Lady Scientist Podcast, Alina shares her tumultuous journey as she wro ..read more

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 science communication on her Youtube channel, Ryan’s Science, where she posts educational videos, her Sci-Tea series with fellow women in science, and other great primers explaining research in psychology ..read more