Even before the COVID-19 pandemic there was a lot of misinformation about vaccines floating around on social media. Public health agencies have been trying to figure out what to do. It turns out that one of the most powerful remedies is also one of the simplest.
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Throughout the tragic events of the past few months — and despite the tragic events still to come — love still perseveres and flourishes. From an unlikely pandemic wedding to the bond formed between researcher and patient, this episode will examine the powerful love that sustains us during this time.
Our first story is from Melanie Hamlett, a Moth-slam-winning storyteller and writer currently based in France. After a life of proud singlehood, Melanie considers settling down during the pandemic. (Just a warning — this story is a bit “R-rated”!) As always, find photos and transcripts of all of our stories on our website.
After Melanie’s story, our host speaks with Joanne Davila, professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, about how the pandemic is affecting relationships.
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Machine learning and data management skills can raise your scientific profile and open up career opportunities, Julie Gould discovers.
As a biomedical science student, Jake Schofield felt frustrated at the length of time it took to repeat experiments, record results and manage protocols, with most of the work paper-based.
In 2016 he and Jan Domanski, a biochemist with programming skills, launched Labstep, an online platform to help scientists record and reproduce experiments.
Schofield, now Labstep’s CEO, tells Julie Gould how launching a start-up and seeking investor funding has honed his business skills.
“Every step we’ve taken has been a huge learning experience,” he says. “I wish there were more opportunities for scientists to try entreprenurial pursits. Scientific analytical problem-based thinking has so many parallels in the start-up world.”
Brian MacNamee, a computer scientist at University College Dublin, outlines the high value of data and its potential to solve science’s reproducibility crisis, citing large sky-scanning telescope projects as an example.
“These projects are generating colossal amounts of data scanning large portions of the sky and that data needs to be categorised,” he says. “Astrophysicists want to go to large data collections and look for the bits they are interested in. It’s impossible to do that by hand. You need to put machine learning systems into those pipelines to categorise and compare data.
“Other researchers are not reading a paper and trying to figure out where the gremlins are inside a data set. They can open the dataset up and find it themselves.”
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Dr. D’Anne Duncan is currently the Assistant Dean of Diversity and Learner Success at the University of California San Francisco Graduate Division. Dr. Duncan is a postdoctoral alumna of Vanderbilt and tells us about her interesting path now working with graduate students.
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We have a wide-ranging chat with Saloni Dattani (Kings College London and University of Hong Kong) about the benefits of dividing scientific labor, the magazine she co-founded (Works in Progress) that shares novel ideas and stories of progress, and fighting online misinformation
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In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Seth Cohen, a program manager since 2019 in the agency’s Biological Technologies Office, takes listeners on a scientific journey that began with childhood fossil-hunting forays with his biology-teacher dad and is unfolding now in his oversight of three ambitious programs that center on some of humanity’s most pressing needs. Two of these take on the relentlessly evolving public-health threats that viral and bacterial pathogens pose. Another program is immersed in the challenge of the increasing scarcity of potable water. If Seth has it his way, these programs will deliver 1) a new strategy for fighting viral infections; 2) a powerful anti-bacterial framework that will recruit our bodies’ home-made, protective molecular means to stave off the emerging public-health catastrophe of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections; and 3) technologies for extracting water from the atmosphere in regions where water is scarce. Seth also shares his government-service experiences by which he has come to know the value of science policy in moving society toward badly-needed solutions. He finishes his story with a pitch to graduate students and others in the innovation ecosystems to embrace exciting and consequential roles in the government R&D landscape that they might not know about, including ones at DARPA. Says Seth in support of that advice, “DARPA has been…one of the best places I could ever imagine working.” When he is not uncovering new marvels of cellular chemistry or opening pathways to new technologies, Seth, a fan and amateur historian of muscle cars, just might be seen tooling around in his 1963 Corvette Stingray convertible.
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In part 2 of Clarity, we’re sharing two more stories about the ways the pandemic has brought our lives into sharper focus.
In our first story, comedian Freddy G realizes just how much he relies on his wife’s support when she gets stuck in another state due to COVID-19 restrictions. Our second story is from Trey Kay, host and producer of the Us & Them podcast. In his story, Trey navigates the contrasting pandemic responses in his home of New York and his home state of West Virginia. As always, find photos and transcripts of all of our stories on our website.
Stay tuned for our final episode of the Stories of COVID-19 series, airing on Friday and Monday!
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Kristian’s interest in statistics and algorithmic fairness has taken her on a winding career path from academia to business, to public service, and back to academia. As she has made different career changes, she didn’t decide between academia vs. industry vs. non-profit, it was more about the problem she was interested in working on at the moment, and what else is happening in her life.
After she earned her PhD in Statistical Science from Duke University, she worked as a research professor at Virginia Tech where she did microsimulation and agent-based modelingin a simulation lab. After that, she tried a data visualization and analytics startup called DataPad that was quickly acquired. When she was thinking about her next step in her career, she wanted to do something with social impact.
She was fascinated by the work of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) that was applying statistical models to casualty data to estimate the number of undocumented conflict casualties. She spent a summer working for HRDAG in Colombia and then decided to join the organization full time. She spent five years as HRDAG’s lead statistician leading the group’s project on criminal justice in the United States focused on algorithmic fairness and predictive policing. Predictive policing uses algorithms to help the police decide where to deploy their resources based on crime statistics, so if you look at where crimes are most likely to occur, this is where you police more often. Kristian’s work showed that these algorithms could actually perpetuate historical over-policing and racial bias in minority communities.
Early this year, she moved from HRDAG back to academia. She started her new position at the University of Pennsylvania in the Computer and Information Science Department on March 2 and a week later Penn closed down for COVID. Over this year, she has learned that she needs to adjust her expectations for herself, and not be so frustrated when she can’t get things done that maybe under normal circumstances she could. It’s not just working from home with her daughter nearby, it’s the stress of everything that’s going on, the additional mental fatigue of having to do all these risks calculations. This year has also made her appreciate the increasingly critical role of data science in driving data-driven decision making.
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