This September, we'll present five stories of home -- from unexpectedly finding science at work in your own family, to leaving home to pursue it.
Hosted by Erin Barker and Nisse Greenberg.
Stories by:
Dr. Carin Bondar is the author of Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom, just published Pegasus Books.She received a PhD in population ecology from the University of British Columbia and has since hosted a variety of online and television programs, working with Scientific American, PBS Digital Studios and the Science Channel. She is currently the lead presenter on Discovery World's "Brave New World with Stephen Hawking." Her independent web series "Wild Sex" has engaged over 60 million viewers and was the subject of a presentation given at TED Global in Edinburgh in 2013 which received over 1.5 million views. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.
Helen Cheng is once a city-dweller turned solitude-seeking naturalist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Helen’s journey took her from the big city to the coasts of the New England, studying horseshoe crabs and receiving her M.S. in Zoology from the University of New Hampshire. Interested in how management plays a role in research, she worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a Sea Grant Knauss Fellow. As an interdisciplinary marine biologist, Helen works on a variety of projects involving research, education and outreach, and science communication. Whenever she gets a free moment, Helen enjoys eating new and delicious foods around the city, hiking in the mountains, swimming in the ocean, and singing and playing acoustic guitar.
As Scientific Director of SPARKforAutism.org, Pamela Feliciano leads the effort to build the largest autism research cohort in the United States, to speed up research and improve lives. SPARK aims to build a partnership between 50,000 individuals with autism and their families and autism researchers. Feliciano has also been a senior scientist at SFARI, the largest private funder of autism research in the United States, since 2013. At SFARI, she has been involved in efforts to develop objective and reliable outcome measures for autism clinical trials. Previously, Feliciano was a senior editor at Nature Genetics, where she was responsible for managing the peer review process of research publications in all areas of genetics. While at Nature Genetics, Feliciano was engaged with the scientific community, attending conferences and giving talks and workshops on editorial decision-making at academic institutes worldwide.
Feliciano holds a B.S. from Cornell University, an M.S. from New York University and a Ph.D. in developmental biology from Stanford University. The journal Science named her Ph.D. thesis work on the parallel evolution of wild populations of three-spine stickleback fish part of the “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2005. Later, Feliciano completed her postdoctoral work with Nicholas Tolwinski at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, studying the establishment of planar cell polarity in epithelial sheets.
Hillary Savoie is a writer, advocate, and mixer of killer cocktails. She is also mother to Esmé, a beautiful little girl with multiple rare genetic conditions. Hillary has blogged about life with Esmé since 2012. Her writing has appeared onMotherlode—the NY Times parenting blog, The Mighty, Vector—Boston Children’s Science and Innovation Blog, and the Huffington Post Blog, among others. In 2015 she published two short memoirs, Around and Into The Unknown and Whoosh. Hillary is the Founder and Director of the Cute Syndrome Foundation, which is dedicated to raising research funds for and awareness of PCDH19 Epilepsy and SCN8A Epilepsy. And she holds a doctorate in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which was great preparation for parenting Esmé, who is an expert in nonverbal persuasion. In her free time she enjoys gardening, dancing to Beyoncé and the Muppets with Esmé, snuggling her geriatric cat, Chicken, and dressing her daughter up as famous women from history. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @HillarySavoie and Facebook @HillarySavoieWriter
Angel Yau is a storyteller, sketch comedian and filmmaker from Queens, New York. She's been featured on Risk!, Mortified! and things that are one word with exclamation marks! She has a monthly show at Videology called, "VHS Present" where storytellers bring their home videos and childhood creations back to life. Currently she is working on an autobiographical, stop- motion animation series where Angel tell anecdotes her childhood memories that jump around from one memory associating to another. They are vignettes crafting into a bigger meaningful lesson and story. She is currently working on a new show for Solocom called, If All My Dreams Came True. She finds humor in solitude, rejection and alienation.