STEMdentity

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...

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 11 years in the US Air Force, and then worked at Maxar...

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! It’s digging into how energy use and associated pollutants scale with increasing population in urban corridors, with some unintuit...

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 advice for how to get better at writing, but is that advice always working for...

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 Hokusai of incredible pieces like The Great Wave off Ka...

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 my own experiences both good and bad, and I...

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 study that points to potential trophic cascades within even a relatively small wilderness space near urban corridors with pumas...

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 any form of neurodivergence to embracing its superpowers while navigating its challenges. This is why I’m so honored that there are people like Dr. Kimberley Corwin in the world! Dr. Corwin has a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis (same….same) and embraced this by forming a Neurodiversity Club in her home depar...

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...

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: Quantifying performance limits for methane detection at municipal solid waste landfills in the journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. We...

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 next messy steps here...

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 csuatmossci Instagram account.

Check out Dr. Barosh’s dissertation to learn more about why galls are the best: <...

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 well.

Song of the w...

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 talk about so many things - the value and need...

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 graduate student (now graduated! congrats!) Dr. Shengyu Wang as first author and his postdoctoral researcher Dr Hairong Xu as secon...

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 couple more sentences!) to making a personal connection that makes your r...

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 sharin...

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 the audience and I’m quite excited to reshare that excellent advice here!

Check out Dr. Vi...

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 STEM journeys is just as interesting to me as the paper itself and we dig into Louis’ personal journey...

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 these working relationships within an academic setting, many of th...

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 has done major updates over the past...

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 learned about reconstructing historical records of bioluminescent milky...

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 work all around the world and today we get the behind-the-scenes of her 2026 Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution journal...

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 commonalities that we can talk thro...

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 anyone in any STEM field transition.

Dr. Julieta Juncosa Calahorrano generously shares both...

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 curiosity.

Getting nervous to ask questions is...

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-engineer (scineer?). The challenge exercised many of the tool we...

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, the joys and importance of finding the right research group for you, and much more!

Loving this b...

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 discussion of th...

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.

Follow Tami on instagram for some daily zen!

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: it’s a process.

Grab your ORA template here!

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 particularly into school at all to getting a Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford and working at the Smiths...

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!

Song of the week: Good Tim...

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 episode: today is always a good day to s...

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 your corner? I’d lo...

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 each of us have settl...

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 li...

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 pe...

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 works directly with clients in Utah, does virtual consults, and specializes in native plants in the Rocky Mountain region. Follow...