The Story Collider

While working as a census taker in 2010, Dawn Fraser is taken by surprise when her partner asks her for a favor. Dawn J. Fraser is a storyteller, educator and and nationally acclaimed speaker based out of New York City. She is the Host of the live show and upcoming podcast ‘Barbershop Stories’, which features storytellers performing true tales in barbershops and salons. Dawn has created programs for college students, educators and entrepreneurs to develop leadership potential through storytelling, and is an Instructor with The Moth and The Story Studio. She was featured amongst some of the nation’s top innovators and change makers as a speaker at TED@NYC and has performed in shows including The Moth Mainstage, Story Collider, RISK and The Unchained Tour. She loves being a twin, a Trinidadian, and tweetable @dawnjfraser. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a young chemist working for the state crime lab, Bill Harwood is unexpectedly called to a crime scene. Lt. Bill Harwood is the director of the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory. He has over 26 years of experience in forensics and law enforcement. Lt. Harwood began his career as a forensic chemist at the Crime Laboratory in 1989 after graduating from the University of Maine at Orono with degrees in Medical Technology and Zoology. He examined physical evidence and testified as an expert witness over the next 5 years. He became a Maine State Trooper in 1994 patrolling Kennebec and Lincoln Counties. He was promoted to Maine State Police Detective in 1998 conducting child abuse investigations for the Kennebec County District Attorney’s Office while also serving as a homicide investigator for central Maine communities. He was promoted to Sergeant of the Crime Laboratory in 2002. He supervised the Firearms and Latent Print units while also serving as the Quality Manager and Assistant Director until 2008. He was then promoted to Lieutenant in charge of headquarters Special Projects until his assignment as crime laboratory director in 2010. Lt. Harwood has served as a Crisis and Hostage Negotiator, Staff Sergeant Cadre Supervisor at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, State Police Emergency Response Team member for the Maine Emergency Management Agency and serves as the administrator of the Maine State Police Evidence Response Team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A chance conversation gives Nneze Akwiwu a chance to study in the United States. Nneze Akwiwu is currently a senior Biology major at Spelman College. She thinks of herself as a bubbly, outgoing and very family oriented individual. She has plans of becoming the first female president of Nigeria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After reading about scientific theories of humor, comedian Chris Duffy decides to see if those principles can make his act better. Chris Duffy is a NYC-based comedian who performs across the country. His shows have been featured in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and in The Onion A.V. Club. Chris is the creator and host ofYou're the Expert, a live show, podcast, and public radio program on Boston's WBUR where three comedians try to guess what a scientist studies all day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A young neuroscientist seeks control through an eating disorder. Kia Salehi is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in neuroscience and mathematics. For two years after graduation she worked as the lab manager for a neuroscience lab at Brown University in Providence, RI. For the past six months she has been traveling and working on organic farms in New Zealand with her girlfriend. She recently returned to the US and is pausing in Providence to reunite with her cats and friends before moving to San Francisco to work in the tech industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Growing up on a cattle ranch, Amanda Stockton dreams of searching for life elsewhere in the universe. Dr. Amanda Stockton is an assistant professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry department at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work walks the line between engineering and science to develop instrumentation capable of looking for organic molecules elsewhere in the solar system. These molecules could be the feedstock for an emergence of life or the remnants of past life now extinct on places like Europa, Enceladus, and Mars. Dr. Stockton grew up on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma, where she graduated from the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she majored in Aerospace Engineering and Chemistry – seemingly unrelated topics but perfect for her “dream job,” i.e. the one she has now. After obtaining a masters at Brown in chemistry, she earned her PhD with Dr. Richard Mathies at the University of California, Berkeley working on increasing the analytical chemistry capabilities of the Mars Organic Analyzer microchip capillary electrophoresis instrument platform. She continued in this vein at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, by furthering the microfluidic engineering side of the technology as first a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow and then as a Technologist. At Georgia Tech, her group’s work seeks to do both the engineering and the science to synergistically promote instrument capabilities and robustness. Currently, the group’s main NASA-funded project is a version of the Mars Organic Analyzer that could fit on a kinetic impactor mission to an icy moon – a project for which testing involves a giant rail gun and a magnetic capture system to decelerate the instrument at 50,000 g or the equivalent of hitting a planet at 5 km/s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To study a dangerous disease, Dan Daneshvar asks families to consider donating their loved one's brains. Dan Daneshvar received an S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Brain and Cognitive Sciences with Concentrations in Cognitive Neuroscience and Poetry. He joined the CTE Center at Boston University School of Medicine in January 2009, where he studies the effects of repetitive head impacts in athletes, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). He will receive M.D./Ph.D. dual degrees in May 2016 before beginning residency at Stanford. He also founded Team Up Against Concussions, an educational program that has educated over 25,000 middle and high schools students about concussions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A series of incidents propels Joe Palca to a career in sleep research. Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology. Since joining NPR in 1992, Dr. Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, “Joe’s Big Idea.” Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors. Palca has also worked as a television science producer, a senior correspondent for Science Magazine, and Washington news editor of Nature. Palca has won numerous awards, several of which came with attractive certificates. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Erika Engelhaupt gets a dream reporting assignment. There's just one problem--she has to take a small prop plane just like the one that she almost crashed in years ago. Erika Engelhaupt is a science writer and editor. At the time of this show, she is about to start a new job as the online science editor at National Geographic. She was most recently a deputy managing editor at Science News magazine, where she started her blog, Gory Details. Gory Details covers all that is creepy, bizarre, or otherwise strangely fascinating in science, from psychopaths to what happens when you pee in the pool. Basically, she likes to give people the creeps, but in a good way. Erika's work has appeared in Science News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, on National Public Radio and in many other newspapers and magazines. Before becoming a writer, she had lots of adventures in biogeochemistry, many of which involved wearing hip waders in Louisiana swamps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Maryam Zaringhalam's scheme to cheat her way into the smart class makes clear a huge flaw in the education system. Maryam Zaringhalam is a molecular biologist and graduate student at The Rockefeller University. In the lab, Maryam tinkers with parasites and computers to understand how small changes to our genetic building blocks can affect how we look and function. When she's not doing science, Maryam runs ArtLab, a series that pairs scientists with artists, and podcasts with Science Soapbox, exploring science and policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jonaki Bhattacharyya ventures out into rugged Canadian wilderness to research wild horses — but can does she have what it takes to survive? This story was produced as part of the Springer Storytellers series. Hear and read more at www.beforetheabstract.com/ Jonaki Bhattacharyya, PhD, does applied research in ethnoecology (focusing on Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge), conservation planning, and wildlife management. Integrating cultural values and knowledge systems with ecological issues, her research endeavors have ranged from remote villages in India to backcountry meadows in British Columbia (BC), Canada. As Senior Researcher with The Firelight Group Research Cooperative, Jonaki works with First Nations and communities in Western Canada. Focusing on relationships between people, animals and places, she seeks to make applied contributions to conservation and human management practices around wildlife, protected areas, natural resources, and ecological systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While working at a hospital, David Putrino finds a surprise in his own medical records. David is a Physical Therapist with a PhD in Neuroscience. He has worked as a clinician in the US, UK and Australia, studied computational neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and designed prostheses for Brain Machine Interface devices at New York University. He is an Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and the Director of Telemedicine and Virtual Rehabilitation at Burke Medical Research Institute. He works to develop low-cost patient monitoring and treatment systems, designed to decrease healthcare costs whilst improving the standard of patient care. David is a co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of GesTherapy, a telerehabilitation software company that works to improve the standard of care patients who require rehabilitation. He is also a volunteer for Not Impossible Labs, a company that develops technological solutions for large-scale humanitarian problems globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Saad Sarwana is finally about to win a high school award, but in his way is a math problem even the teacher got wrong. Saad Sarwana grew up in Pakistan, and moved first to Canada and then eventually to the US to attend graduate school in Physics. He's a professional physicist by day and an amateur standup comedian by night! As a Physicist, Saad has over 30 peer reviewed publications and two US patents. As a comedian Saad has performed over 1000 shows over 20 years. He co-hosts the Science Channel show "Outrageous Acts of Science", Season four starts to air in Feb 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While being treated after an accident, Rachel Fairbank struggles with not being the researcher. Rachel Fairbank received her bachelor's in biology from Cornell University, did some graduate work in the developmental biology program at Baylor College of Medicine, and is currently working on an MFA in creative writing at the University of Houston, where she also works as a science writer. In her spare time, she likes to box. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Abhishek Shah takes a simple job to pay for school--toxic waste disposal. Being a biomedical engineer, Abhishek Shah knows everything about physics, chemistry and biology. He applies the same fundamentals to his stand up comedy and storytelling to improve the chemistry with audience by applying the physics of joke structure. His intriguing experiences and fascinating background makes him a unique storyteller. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices