Episodes

Finding jobs after graduate school is a huge transition period that isn’t talked about nearly enough. So I’m so grateful that my friend Dr. Afshan Khaleghi was willing to come onto the podcast to talk about her recent experiences - and successes! - in finding a non-academic job after graduate school. We talk about how she navigated how the “real world” views PhDs and how she engineered her way into quickly and easily getting recommended even by strangers for positions. And! If you feel like you...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Eric Mei, who is a PhD candidate in the department of Atmospheric and Climate Science at University of Washington. We’re digging into his 2026 PNAS paper Multidecadal preindustrial methane variability can be explained by noise in the source–sink imbalance. I’ll admit that meth...

Welcome to a “special edition” of giving better talks: panels! And if you don’t think this applies to you…chances are good that if you stick around in one field long enough, you’re going to be asked to be on a panel or moderate a panel! Whether you’re the moderator or a panelist, there are some elements in common with giving a solo talk along with some unique elements. I find panels (both moderating and speaking) to be a lot of fun and a lot less pressure than solo talks. Let’s talk about how to...

It’s another episode on giving better talks! Science talks, conference talks, research talks, defenses of your Bachelor’s, Master’s, PhD, or Doctorate of Engineering work….all of these talks have the potential to invite your audience to come along with you and learn or to simply watch you in befuddlement and zone out. Let’s talk about getting better at talking :) Find all episodes for Giving Better Talks here! Song of the week: another Lykke Li double header! Lucky Again by Lykke Li Lucky Agai...

This is a follow-up episode from last week’s delightful episode with Dr. Sarah Shaw. After we hit stop record, we fell to chatting about the couches in our lives - the things that somewhat matter but just don’t need to be done right away until the time is right. We all have a lot of couches in our lives. It’s ok to stop worrying about each of them all of the time. Some couches will fade away and others will get finished when you can get to it. Song of the week: another double header! I Follow ...

My guest today is the kind of woman in STEM that I infinitely appreciate and want to spend my time with. Dr. Sarah Shaw is an engineer, a mentor, a parent, until recently a student, and so many other roles. In short, she has excelled at doing a little bit of everything! She currently works as a Senior Engineer at the Aerospace Corporation and just wrapped up her PhD in Systems Engineering in Spring 2026. She additionally has a MS in Astronautical Engineering a BS in Mechanical Engineering, spent...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Liam Thompson, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah in the Department of Atmospheric Science. We’re talking about his 2026 paper “Contrasting patterns in urban energy and emission scaling” in Environmental Research Letters. I find this meta-analysis so interesting!...

Writing. If you're in STEM, you likely have a number of writing tasks, including but not limited to academic journal articles, progress reports, final project reports, whitepapers, proposals, and applications. And it turns out, I love talking about big ideas like writing or getting better at talks or women in STEM in series! So this is the start of a new series, Getting better at writing in STEM. For this inaugural episode, let’s just focus on getting going. You’ve almost certainly been given ad...

It’s the reminder episode you maybe forgot you needed: STOP COMPARING YOURSELF TO OTHERS BECAUSE YOU ARE AMAZING AS YOU ARE. Your unique set of interests, skills, and talents make you you, and no one else is bringing all of that to the table. Ok, ok, it’s easier said than done but take a listen and let’s walk away with some concrete actions for reminding ourselves to get out of the cycle of negative comparison and into the habit of self-appreciation! Even world-renowned artists like Katsushika ...

We all know the big picture: women make half the sky but do not make up half the global STEM workforce, especially in engineering and mathematics. Visibility matters: by being able to tell our stories and serve as role models and mentors for each other while receiving steady support from the incredible men that some of us get to work with, I believe that we can make a difference. So I’m using my podcast platform to explicitly highlight incredible women in STEM. Here I talk a little about some of...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Chinmay Sonawane, who is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in the Department of Biology. We’re talking about his 2026 paper “Mammal Community Responses to Increasing Puma Activity in a Suburban Preserve” in the journal Ecology and Evolution. This is such a fascinating stu...

Robert Frost said “The best way out is always through”, but that doesn’t mean that we need to do anything alone. STEM is a team sport and so is learning to work with your particular skills and strengths, not against them. That feels especially true when moving from fighting nay form of neurodivergence to embracing its superpowers while navigating its challenges. This is why I’m so honored that there are people like Dr. Kimberely Corwin in the world! Dr. Corwin has a late-in life ADHD diagnosis (...

Ok spoiler alert: if you have a super satisfying, rich social life and you get to hang out with people in all walks of your life - work, hobbies, and anything else that lights you up - this episode might not be the one for you! Don’t worry, I’ll be back next week! And for the rest of us.... I see you. I am you. It’s never been easy for me to just “fit in” with the people I work or go to school with and it’s taken me some time to find my people in my STEM parts of my life. But I have, and I’m so...

You know what’s absolutely wild to me?! People who have full time jobs and go to school at the same time. I was a full time student for all of my higher education (undergraduate and graduate school) and I barely survived being a full-time cat mom for only half of that. But! I am really fortunate enough to get to work with a ton of amazing people and students who are balancing both with such grace. Francisco Cordova is one of those amazing people and I can’t wait for you to meet him! Song of the...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Dr. Nadia Tarakki, who is a postdoctoral researcher at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. She works at the very cool FluxLab, led by Dave Risk. We’re digging into her awesome 2026 paper Rethinking EPA Method 21 Surface Emissions Monitoring: Quant...

Making any progress at all on the things that challenge us in our STEM jobs - and our lives - is AWESOME. Celebrate the hell out of these wins! And: sometimes you need a little extra oomph to get over hurdles that are more stressful. That’s where this episode comes in…It just takes next courageous steps! Want to hang out and do a social media challenge sharing your courageous steps? Tag me on Instagram @STEMdentity so I can celebrate the hell out of you!! Check out the companion episode on nex...

STEM is a team sport. Our scientific endeavors and engineering marvels are too complex to be handled by the same person. Today, I’m excited to talk to one of the people who are on the “front-lines” of science and engineering: Dr. Theresa Barosh, a professional science communicator for Colorado State University! Dr. Barosh got a PhD in Ecology and moved to science communication immediately after graduate school. She writes amazing articles for Colorado State University and manages the beautiful c...

There’s no right way to give a fantastic talk and yet there seems to be a stigma in STEM against having written notes with you when you’re giving a talk at a conference or other large speaking engagement. There are so many other situations in which people are reading off of written scripts (audiobooks! acting!) so let’s drop the stigma. There are ways to easily set yourself up for giving a wonderful, engaging talk even if you script out almost every single word, so let’s dig into how to do it we...

My favorite part of going to conferences is making new, unique connections that I could never have predicted. Paul Jenkins is one of those instant connections of someone who is the embodiment of someone who has figured out how to live a life well lived, with so much more to come! Paul is the CEO of two highly successful engineering firms and still spends a great deal of focus and energy on challenging and growing himself through many degrees - the latest being a PhD in Systems Engineering. We ta...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Dr. Thomas Weber, who is an associate professor at University of Rochester in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. We’re digging into his group’s 2026 PNAS journal article “Phosphate scarcity governs methane production in the global open ocean”, written with his...

Applying for a new job is a part of growing in your STEM career! ... and yet most of us do it so rarely that each application can feel overwhelming and stressful. I’ve had the opportunity to review many applications for several different job postings both at a large institution and at small businesses. Today’s episode is all about how to connect your job posting to the human on the other side of your application packet, from following the 1” margin rule (seriously! it's not worth shoving in a co...

Does this sound familiar: you need to start a paper but you stare at the blank page and then keep writing and deleting the first sentence. Or you have a draft that you need to pass onto your team for feedback but really it would be much better if you just stayed up for a few more hours and obsessively edited it. There are a lot of scenarios in our STEM work that put us in freeze or perfectionism cycles. I’ve been there and still find myself there more often than I’d like! So today I’m sharing on...

It’s graduation season! And graduating means transitions and transitions means people giving you advice, whether you asked for it or not. That being said, some advice is truly excellent and I’m excited to bring you advice from three STEM professionals who all graduated from the Colorado State University Systems Engineering program: Dr. Sarah Shaw, Dr. Art Villanueva, and Brian Johnston. They were recently challenged on an alumni panel that I had the pleasure to attend to provide 3-word advice to...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities. My guest today is Dr. Louis Rivoire, who is a research scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. We’re discussing his 2026 Communications Earth & Environment journal article, “Tracking jet streams as Lagrangian objects”. But of course, as always, how people get to where they are in their ...