Episodes

No matter where you are in your STEM career stage, chances are very high that you are someone’s mentee and you are also someone’s mentor, or you’re about to start mentoring. These relationships can go extremely well - and it’s also really common for them to run into bumps or roadblocks. What can you do when these challenges arise? I’m excited to welcome Dr. Jeff Pierce back onto STEMdentiy for part 2 of our conversation, this time on mentor-mentee relationships. Even though we mostly focus on t...

Mental health: we all know we should be doing “something” to take care of it, but it’s often easy to put mental on the back burner amidst our busy lives until we’ve forgotten about it for too long and realize that the kitchen is starting to burn down. Someone I really admire for realizing that his kitchen was in full flames, taking accountability and action, and coming out the other side stronger is my graduate advisor, Dr. Jeff Pierce. Jeff has had challenges on and off with mental health but ...

You’ve probably heard the advice, “You should be reading a peer-reviewed journal article every day of your life!”...and if you’re like me, you’re thinking things like, “Every day? Like even weekends? And my whole life? That’s a lot of really boring reading!” So I explored reading a journal article (almost) every single day for 30 days (yes, even weekends), but I added in the secret sauce that most people don’t add to their advice: it can be a paper on…anything. I learned about beavers. I learne...

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. Zoe Jewell, who is Adjunct associate professor at Duke University USA, Associate Academic at University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and co-founder of the nonprofit WildTrack, Inc. along with her partner Dr. Sky Alibhai. Dr. Jewell has been doing incredible field wo...

Grad school: other than being short for graduate school, what is it like anyways for STEM fields? It’s actually surprisingly common for people to go to grad school without much idea of what it will entail. I was definitely one of those people - all I knew is that it was probably school-like and that it seemed like the thing to do when I looked around and didn’t like the job options that I could see with my undergraduate degree. Even though each experience will be unique, there are some commonal...

Graduate school can be a murky path with either no clear exit ramp or too many exit possibilities (aka Jobs!) after graduation. Sometimes those options are clearly discussed within your degree program formally or informally and sometimes they’re not. A common option for graduate students getting a PhD is to get a postdoctoral position afterwards, especially if they want to stay in research. What’s less talked about are some of the challenges of moving from school to a postdoc that can happen to ...

If you are a (mostly) normal, functioning adult in a STEM career or school, you’ve probably experienced times like this: you are in a lecture or meeting or talk and you have a question. All of a sudden, you’re getting sweaty. Maybe shaky. You doubt your question. You consider whether you’ve forgotten how to speak words altogether. And the chance to ask your question passes, and you’re left feeling relieved that you didn’t have to speak up but disappointed that you didn’t get to satisfy your curi...

Curiosity. It seems like a hallmark of being a STEM professional and yet it feels like more than ever, curiosity has to take the backburner to emails, meetings, AI summaries, deliverables, reports, due dates, and on and on… So I did it: I intentionally chose to be curious about whatever I wanted for 15 minutes a day for 30 minutes. How did it go? Would I recommend it to the scientists and engineers in my life? (Spoiler alert: I would!) In fact, if anything, I feel like an even better scientist-...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an amazing 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 Luca Hargitai, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath. We’re discussing her 2025 Psychological Medicine paper, “The role of psychological strengths in positive life outcomes in adults w/ ADHD”. We also talk about how she became interested in psychological research, th...

Emails. They probably had a brief moment in the sun as a useful communication tool before they exploded into endless-headed Hydras with no end in sight. Does it need to be this way? In this episode, we figure out your relationship with email and steps towards not letting your inbox run your days. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and I sure don’t want my life to be a reply-all email chain! BTW - I talk about the nervous system briefly in this episode. To really get an awesome dis...

As scientists and engineers, we are trained to tune into our minds. Critical thought and mental output is often the quantities recognized and nurtured throughout our career. But our minds don’t exist in a vacuum: they exist as a part of our body system. This episode with Somatic Coach Tami Schweber is all about tuning back into our bodies and why that might help us in our STEM careers. Check out Tami’s website: https://theknowingwell.ca/ and sign up for her monthly community sessions here. Fol...

It’s easy to romanticize science as a series of lightning bolts: researchers have brilliant research questions and hypotheses suddenly come to them out of the blue! So if this doesn’t happen to you, you’re bad at research right? Right? No! There are simple, easy to apply frameworks for every major part of the research process form coming up with research questions to writing up results. Today, let’s dig into how to come up with research questions. Developing research questions is not a mystery:...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an amazing 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. Audrey Lin, who just wrapped up a postdoctoral researcher position at the American Museum of Natural History. We’re discussing her 2025 PNAS paper, “A legacy of genetic entanglement with wolves shapes modern dogs”. We also talk about her winding path from not being particul...

Having fun in your STEM job is something that probably seems like a good idea but can get completely lost in the rush of the day-to-day. Even more subversive, much of our time might be spent thinking about when we will be happy: We’ll be happy when we get the job, graduate with the degree, go on the vacation, get the paper published, get the successful experimental result… Instead of “I’ll be happy when”ing ourselves, can we shift towards “I am happy now” throughout our days? Take a listen! So...

I’m dropping this quick minisode to invite us all to jump joy first into a creativity challenge: 15 minutes a day. 30 days. Just…explore the thing you’re curious about. Maybe you take an intentional break at work. Maybe you write the things that pop into mind on a sticky note and you do a deep dive at the end of your day. Curiosity and creativity are STEM super powers for us scientists and engineers, but the busyness of our days can stifle those sparks. It doesn’t matter when you find this episo...

Dr. Zitely Tzompa Sosa is the bright light we need in science policy. Trained as an atmospheric chemist, Zitely has navigated several international moves for school and work. Along the way, she found that working in policy is her guiding light for showing up to work as her most authentic self. Song of the week: The Wild Rover by Lankum More about Ravi, a true hero of atmospheric chemistry! Navigating finding yourself in your career doesn’t have to be a solo sport. Would you like to have me in y...

Groundhog Day: it’s a holiday AND a movie! (Movie spoiler alert ahead FYI - it’s been out for >30 years so I don’t apologize.) For those of us who know the 1993 movie classic starring Bill Murray as grumpy TV weather forecaster Phil Conners, we’ll remember that poor Phil got himself stuck in a time loop, forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again. And ultimately, only through growth and change did he find his way out of the time loop. And….I can almost guarantee that e...

There’s almost no way to get most of our pulses racing faster than the thought of public speaking. We all have to give talks, both big and small and for many of us, talks of any size spiral us into fear and self-doubt. There are a lot of tools out there to deal with nerves, and this episode goes into several practical tools you can deploy to move from panic to ease when speaking. This episode is the second of two parts with part one diving into how to level up your talks by treating them like p...

We all have to give talks - whether it’s a big conference talk in front of hundreds of people or quick meeting presentations. And even though we only spend a small fraction of our time speaking in front of others, our talks are one of the main ways people we don’t directly work with can get to know us. Talks are also one of our fastest ways to communicate the amazing things we do - and can be the most engaging way to get others’ attention! So why shouldn’t we treat talks like any other performa...

I’m so excited to bring you this conversation with my very good friends, Taylor Christenson and Tim Remkes! Taylor and Tim met during their bachelor’s degree program in Botany at Weber State University and married shortly after school. They’ve successfully explored several career paths and keep finding themselves back doing what they love with being outside and teaching. Tim has built his own amazing environmental services company for native landscapes - https://remkesenvironmental.com/. He wor...

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an amazing 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. Eric Boyd, a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology at Montana State University. We talk about his group’s paper "Seismic shifts in the geochemical and microbial composition of a Yellowstone aquifer" (2025, PNAS Nexus). We also talk about how he landed...

Sometimes life is like learning to drive a car in flat, dry conditions and then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of the mountains, trying to navigate curves and learning that you might just burn your brakes out if you don’t use your car’s other tools when you’re careening downhill. Just like you needed to shift into a lower gear, we all need tools that help us become more resilient towards work’s (and life’s!) stressors. Today I talk about two major categories of tools: tools tha...

We are all scientists, engineers, and artists, and we can use this innate curiosity and creativity to keep pointing ourselves towards the life we want. We all know about frameworks like growth mindset, but sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the flurry of work pressures and before you know it, work feels stagnant and the farthest thing from magical. In this episode, I dig into core values versus limiting beliefs, growth mindset, and how we can apply tools to move towards the jobs and careers we ...

Five jobs in five years was a whole lot and a complete life-changer all in one. In this episode I walk through how each job came about and highlight some of the key lessons I took away from each one. This episode is all about putting sampling and ikigai (episode 1!!) into practice. Want to work with me one-on-one? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro Work Audit call with you to discuss your top blockers at work and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentit...