Socializing with Scientists

Dianne Newman links antibiotic resistance to climate (she's a microbiologist)

In college, Dianne didn't take any biology classes (she was a German studies major). But she was curious about almost everything, so in her first semester of graduate school, she tried an environmental microbiology class. She fell in love.  Dianne Newmann [https://dknweb.caltech.edu/] is now a microbiologist at Caltech [https://www.bbe.caltech.edu/people/dianne-k-newman], studying bacteria and the antibiotic resistance they sometimes develop. She recently discovered [https://authors.library.caltech.edu/records/qf8bs-eqr98] that in regions of the world that have experienced a drought, the amount of antibiotic resistant bacteria increases in the soil, as well as in nearby hospitals. As our climate changes, droughts could become a more regular occurrence; antibiotic resistant bacteria could travel all around our interconnected world, she notes. As pharmaceutical companies put an end to their antibiotic development programs, Dianne says, "It's really important that governments step in and continue to support the development of basic research for new drugs, because sometimes the profit incentive sadly isn't there for big pharmaceutical companies. And yet this is going to be a huge public health crisis."  WHO Global antibiotic resistance surveillance report 2025 [https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/B09585]

Dylan Jervis spots methane emissions from low Earth orbit (he's a physicist)

Dylan [https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylan-jervis-65807b24/] was a kid who found comfort in math and fun in music, but ultimately he followed a path to science. He became a physicist and was inspired to study climate change by a speech that US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gave, as well as his time working at a backcountry lodge in the Canadian Rockies. Dylan Jervis [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FN6O8vYAAAAJ&hl=en] now works for GHGSat, a company that monitors greenhouse gas emissions, most notably methane, from space. His recent paper [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv3183] in Science used a constellation of high resolution satellites to estimate global methane emissions from individual sources.

Katie McMahon considers humidity's effect on babies' growth (she's a human environment geographer)

Katie was a curious, hard-working kid, but it wasn't until her freshman year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that she found her calling. That year, she happened to be placed in two geography classes, and her career trajectory started falling into place.  Katie McMahon [https://www.geog.ucsb.edu/people/students/katie-mcmahon] is now a PhD student in human environment geography at UC Santa Barbara, and her recent work in Science Advances [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx3010]  shows that children who were exposed to high humid heat in utero were significantly more likely to have stunted growth years later, as compared to those who experienced only high heat. Her research looks at the "intersections of climate & environmental change, social vulnerability, human health, and food & water security," and her next project will investigate how heat affects the health of farm workers in the Salinas Valley in California.  Listen to this episode to learn more about Katie's journey, as well as what's ahead for her!

Brian Walsh peers at Earth from the moon (he's a space physicist)

To prepare for the moment his telescope landed on the moon, Brian read sports psychology books. "You're not going to read Kepler or Isaac Newton [to learn] about how to deal with high pressure situations," he said. It turned out he didn't actually need much help. Brian Walsh [https://sites.bu.edu/bwalsh/]is a space physicist and professor at Boston University [https://www.bu.edu/csp/profiles/brian-walsh/], and he and his team created a telescope that landed on the moon last year. The telescope LEXI [https://sites.bu.edu/lexi/] hitched a ride on a spacecraft built by Firefly Aerospace [https://fireflyspace.com/missions/blue-ghost-mission-1/], and studied the interaction between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field. Solar wind and geomagnetic storms can meddle with, or even harm, human-made technologies like satellites, GPS, and the electrical grid; now, Brian wants to protect Earth from these space phenomena. His new research suggests that putting mass into certain regions of space could divert geomagnetic storms away from Earth. (Here's a preprint [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19477] of his work.) Brian is on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/drbwalsh.bsky.social] and his research center is on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/buphotonicscenter/].

Sarah Kugel brings science to a small town (she's the director of a nature center)

Sarah Kugel [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-kugel2022/] grew up smashing pokeweed berries to make her own paint and assembling intricate habitats for garter snakes. She was a kid who loved nature, and, when she went to college, she majored in resource ecology. But Sarah always had an interest in business as well, and now she combines the two as the director of a nature center in Massachusetts. She considers the organization its own ecosystem, and works to serve the community while also ensuring the center has the resources it needs to function. The South Shore YMCA Nature Center: https://ssymcanaturecenter.org/