Biology and culture collide! We discuss the intersection of sex, gender, and sports with Dr. Adrianna San Roman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge who studies sex chromosome aneuploidy. Adrianna first walks us throug

Emily Nelson on the COVID-19 Literature Surveillance Team

May 13th, 2020 56m 17s

Over 200 papers on COVID-19 are published every day! In this episode we chat with Emily Nelson, PhD, about her work on the COVID-19 Literature Surveillance Team (https://www.covid19lst.org/), a group of 50 individuals who are collecting, annota

Xueting Qiu on the latest insights from 10,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes

Apr 30th, 2020 30m 25s

Returning champion Xueting Qiu tells us about the newest findings from analyzing 10,000+ SARS-CoV-2 genomes. We discuss what the genomes tell us about the origins and spread of the outbreak across the US, how fast the virus is mutating, whethe

Xueting Qiu with a coronavirus update

Mar 15th, 2020 31m 40s

Xueting Qiu, a molecular epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, revisits AATB to talk about the current state of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and why we needed to start social distancing yesterday.

Xueting Qiu on lessons from the COVID19 genome

Feb 27th, 2020 40m 57s

Coronavirus, coming to a neighborhood near you! In this episode we interview Xueting Qiu, a molecular epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. After a brief recap of your fave viruses, including MERS (camels!), bird flu

Yarden Katz on how intellectual property affects the scientific questions we pursue

Dec 30th, 2019 34m 54s

Do we need a Bernie Sanders or AOC for academia? We tackle this question with Yarden Katz, a departmental fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, who has written about how the politics and culture of academia influence the scientif

David Altshuler on how human genetics informs drug discovery

Aug 20th, 2019 32m 5s

Genetics field trip! In this episode we hopped in Jenny's car and headed to Vertex Pharmaceuticals where we spoke with Chief Scientific Officer, David Altschuler. Previously, as a core member of the Broad Institute, David's academic research fo

Clare Malone on deciding between academia and industry

Jul 3rd, 2019 36m 11s

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Clare Malone, a postdoctoral fellow studying the genetics of neuroblastoma is currently undecided about whether to apply to faculty positions or for jobs in industry. We talk through it all: her thoughts on mone

Carrie Blout on discovering what's in your genome

May 22nd, 2019 35m 15s

What would happen if everyone got their genome sequenced? This question is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Instead, it is a research question that Senior Genetic Counselor Carrie Blout and her colleagues at the Genomes2People initiative

Nyssa Boardman on why a PhD is hard

Mar 31st, 2019 36m 25s

“PhDs are hard”. We all heard this when we were deciding to apply to PhD programs, but even after completing one it is difficult to articulate why a PhD is difficult. In this episode we tackle this question with Nyssa Boardman, a clinical psych

Justin Chen on PhD burnout

Feb 26th, 2019 23m 19s

Ever since we read Justin Chen’s article in STAT news about his experience as a PhD student at MIT, we knew we needed to interview him. The article, titled “Coming to terms with six years in science: obsession, isolation, and moments of wonder”

Andy Lane on why men get cancer more often than women

Feb 7th, 2019 20m 53s

Men get cancer more frequently than women, a finding that was thought to be due to exposure to carcinogens. New research by Dr. Andrew Lane at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston provides evidence for a new theory: that women are protect

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