EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Content may be slightly edited for clarity.
Angelica
Hello and welcome to So Curious!, presented by the Franklin Institute.
Bey
In this season, Human 2.0, we’ll be talking to scientists and non-scientists alike about technology and innovation surrounding the human experience.
Angelica
We’re your hosts. I am Angelica Pasquini.
Bey
And I’m the Bul Bey. But of course, you can just call me Bey.
Angelica
In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about inclusion and advancing technology with grad student Kendall Nichols, and neurobiologist Anja Scholze. Inclusion and advancing technology, Bey?
Bey
Science has gotten to where it is because of the people who have asked the questions. But it begs the question, who’s asking the question about the questions?
Angelica
Okay, that’s a rapper, ladies and gentlemen.
Angelica
Yeah, I love that.
Bey
Yeah. So I’m really excited to have these questions answered and also to have this conversation, to just gain a better understanding about the landscape, where it was, where it is, where’s it going?
Angelica
Yeah. It’s so true. There’s been so many gatekeepers in our world. One interesting thing about COVID in my world with comedy, is you could see how many people were actually funny all along and like, how many people are brilliant writers and have incredible premises for characters. And now all the doors have been opened. But there’s been so much gatekeeping around writing for TV for so many years, and now these people are getting writers room jobs, or making their own shows.
Bey
Yeah, and something I’ve been picking up on, some of these discussions that we’ve been having, is science is essentially based off of curiosity — hence the podcast that we’re on. But what question is being asked? The access point just comes from asking the question, number one, and then following that question all the way through, because you could be anywhere and deal with anything. And there’s science right in front of you. You just have to ask the question. A really big thing is, who’s helping you answer that question? What tools do you have to try to explore those curiosities?
Angelica
Yeah.
Bey
And we’re going to be having some really good, cool conversations.
Angelica
Totally. I also think when someone asks a question, it’s so important to consider who that person is, because when they are asking it, they’re coming from their own point of view. And they’re coming with their own understanding. What’s really cool about, and I’m so excited about talking to both these people, is that they’re in the science world and they’re innovating. And they’re also saying, hey, hold on, we need to include everyone. And I know that both of us have recently learned that the more diversity that’s included — in writing studies and doing research and publishing work — the more diversity, the stronger the work and the better the findings.
Bey
Yeah. Planet Earth, this little blue dot that we’re on, is really bound by science. It’s held together by science. And so when you think about the world of science, it can’t be rigid. It shouldn’t be rigid. Every corner of the globe should be contributing to it because essentially every corner of the globe is affected by it.
Angelica
Right.
Bey
So these questions, these inquiries are really super important. And I’m always curious about the connection that we have to our surroundings, how it affects us, how we can affect it, and start crafting the world. The fact that you can create a world around you is, like really astonishing to me.
Angelica
It is. And the fact that now the power is so much more in the people’s hands than ever, with things like DIY science, even using 3D printers to..
Bey
Democratizing science!
Angelica
Exactly. And then there’s going to be all kinds of questions around that as we open the doors and more people are allowed in. I think it’s fabulous. And we need to make sure that ethically we are regulating certain things as we have new findings. But ironically, it was such a small pool of people who have created a lot of the standards and metrics that we based reality on, that all of this is expanding now.
Bey
Absolutely. There’s no boundaries anymore, which is fun, but also a little weird.
Angelica
Right. So we asked these people about the work that they’re doing around this. So I’m excited.
Bey
Our first guest is Anja Scholze. Anja Scholze is the program director of Bio and Design at The Tech Interactive. She leads the design and development of interactive experiences that inspire visitors to engage in biotechnology and the life sciences. Scholze is a champion of accessibility in science and is currently working on creating a new kind of exhibit that will serve as a community bio-maker space, where a hands-on experience will exist at the intersection of biology, design and technology. In her bio-design studio, visitors will get to be scientists.
Angelica
Can you tell us a bit about what you do, what you create, and your intention behind what you make?
Anja Scholze
My work mostly centers around trying to think about creating experiences for the everyday person that intersects biology with technology and design and making. So we really want to engage, in particular, young people with these sort of fields of biology, and all the new fields of bioengineering and synthetic biology, in a more fun and engaging way. And we do that by creating these experiences that blend a lot of things and allow everybody who comes in to play with things, to create something for themselves. So we don’t want to explain to people what biology is and give them all of the detailed facts. We want them to come in and engage in an experience for themselves. It lets them feel empowered, to think about biology as a creative medium or a problem-solving space that they can do something with. We do that by creating a variety of experiences. Some of them have been digital in the past, and then right now, my work focuses on trying to do that by leveraging the maker movement and maker spaces that people have probably heard of. But traditionally, maker spaces have been related to engineering.
Anja Scholze
And so we said, can we take some of the learnings from what people do in maker spaces and creating things, and can we find a way to intersect that with biology and design, and get kids really excited about what is oftentimes a “boring” subject in school?
Angelica
So when we talk about creating access to science, a lot of people will immediately want to have a conversation about schools. What does a school system that really champions science accessibility look like?
Anja Scholze
I think the most sort of obvious challenge is that science is one of the subjects that requires stuff to do it. Oftentimes you need expensive lab equipment, you need tools, you need spaces, you need special knowledge, and those things are not distributed equally. And then on top of that, my personal thinking about one of the things that really needs to change, and how we think about teaching young people science, which is: rethink how we frame science for young people so that their first exposure to science sets them up for success with the science that they’re going to see for the rest of their lives. And for me, that means shifting the framing from science as a static body of fact, it’s a body of knowledge that you do science by learning about it. As opposed to science as a process of an active discovery, and having kids participate in that part of it. That’s step one. So I think shifting that framing, providing ways to find access to the tools that are necessary to do some of the more complex stuff, and then also, us as educators, shifting our own thinking about what is science so that it doesn’t always need to have those sort of resources.
Anja Scholze
It doesn’t need to be a micro-pipetter. If you’re thinking about science as a process, and engaging kids in that inquiry and empowering them to do the science for themselves, instead of replicating an experiment that somebody did 100 years ago, you can use different tools. You can use accessible things, things that they find in their community, problems that they care about, things they find around their home. And if we can shift our thinking about what is teaching science to include that, I think it’s accessible to more people and also is more welcoming to a broader range of people, and a broader set of kids because it’s more relevant to their lives and their communities.
Bey
That’s really important, and building on that, how do you ensure that when new science is discovered, that it gets passed on? Is this, I guess, an antidote for misinformation, ensuring that information is passed on, that it’s accurate as well?
Anja Scholze
That’s an interesting one. I think that if we had a more science-literate general public, it would be easier to imagine that the burden of passing that information on (as you said, correctly), is more equally shared. I’ve seen research saying that people are most convinced by hearing what they hear from people that they trust and care about. The most impact can be had by communicating correct scientific knowledge by it coming from people in our lives already.
Bey
Yeah. And that speaks to including all these different voices so that function can happen, that trust can be built. And in order for that trust to be built, I’d imagine you need to include diverse groups of voices and diverse groups of people so everyone can have that access point.
Angelica
I want to talk about your specific connection to science: growing up, how you sort of became connected to science, and then also why it’s important to you to create this accessibility, especially in such a creative way, and that’s so uniquely you.
Anja Scholze
I grew up on an island in Alaska, actually, so it was pretty remote. I went to public schools that didn’t have any sort of advanced schooling, I guess, but I always loved sciences, I loved outdoors, I loved nature.
Anja Scholze
I think that’s where my love of science came from. I love asking questions, and that is a core part of science. It’s just being curious and asking questions. And I think when I realized that those two intersected, I was really excited by that. That was like where my intellectual interest lay. I really wanted to get to ask questions about biology. The option I was looking at was going on to do a post-doc and stay in academia, and I realized that that wasn’t actually quite where my passion was. I really, really loved helping other people experience that joy that I got to experience at the graduate level of science, which sort of relates back to what I was talking about, with how we frame science for young people. Science at the graduate school level is the joy of discovery, and nobody tells you what to do. And you decide what questions you want to ask and how to get the information and what matters. That’s what science is! But most people never experience that because you have to end up in a graduate program.
Angelica
Yeah. I think what we are gathering from this information is you’re sort of trying to help take away out some of the gatekeeping around science. Is that right?
Anja Scholze
Yes, I think that’s a great way of putting it.
Bey
Can you open up that discussion a little bit more and tell us how Maker space democratizes science and how it does outreach to get people involved?
Anja Scholze
The power that Maker approaches bring is that they are very intentionally learner-centered, and framed around this idea that the learner constructs their knowledge. A third party doesn’t just come up to you and say, here are the things you learn, and then you learn. Then the idea is that through building something yourself, you construct your own knowledge. And that process, that iterative process is how somebody actually learned something.
Angelica
For someone who might not be familiar with the term, just let us know what a makerspace is.
Anja Scholze
Yeah. A Makerspace is usually just sort of a flexible workshop space that provides tools and resources for people to come in and create things.
Bey
I think that’s really cool because….I spoke about, earlier, shaking up the structures of education and how we interact with science. When I think of a science lab, you know: coats, beakers, glassware, and all the sorts. But you’re saying that if Angelica and I were to step into this space, this is a workshop? What’s around us in this space?
Anja Scholze
That’s a really interesting question. It’s something we actually thought pretty intentionally about in the design of the space that I run: the Biotinkering lab, we call it, which is this intersection of, like, making and biology. We drew inspiration for the space from kids’ bedrooms and labs. So it’s actually, like, sort of a weirdly shaped space. It’s not square. And then on top of that, we layer the science equipment. People walk into a space like, “this doesn’t feel like a lab!” When you walk into a sterile lab space people don’t want to touch anything. We wanted to sort of remove that association with biology. There’s, like, books in here. There are soft cushions by the window. It’s a welcoming space. There’s things that look like your kitchen, look like your library. Whatever you bring is part of what’s valuable to contribute to science. Science lives with this. i isn’t separated.
Angelica
I’m curious about adults, or actually maybe any age maker spaces. I’m curious about the impact of biology maker spaces in the future of human health and medicine. Like, what kind of findings? What’s a cool example of a finding someone has found in a maker space.
Anja Scholze
There’s been a lot of really interesting projects that have emerged from them that highlight the value of adding in different voices to who does science and coming back. I like to ask questions, like who asks [the] questions determines what questions are asked, which determines what science is done. And that’s critical for what we know about the world. It starts with who asks the questions.
Anja Scholze
And historically, it has been a fairly narrow slice of the population that asks the questions that we answer with science. There’s been some really interesting work in the people looking to … It’s called the Open Insulin Project. So insulin is really expensive, but the technology to manufacture that using biological systems are pretty old, but it’s not accessible. It’s really expensive. And so they’re the project in one of these biohacker, Biomaker spaces to basically hack that process and be able to produce insulin themselves.
Angelica
Wow. So people have done that.
Anja Scholze
They’re pretty far along in the process. I don’t think they’ve actually successfully produced anything. And then there’s the whole, like, probably a regulatory step after that. That’s a whole other part of the process.
Angelica
Where are some of the maker spaces located?
Anja Scholze
The most well-known first one was in New York City called Gen Space. There are several in the Bay Area. There’s one in Seattle, Chicago. At this point, there’s ones all over the US, I suppose all over the globe! And, maybe not surprisingly, a lot of them sprung up initially in urban centers.
Angelica
What do you see, like pie in the sky? Just…. What would be your greatest dream for these spaces?
Anja Scholze
I would love to see the spaces that are distributed through all these different regions around the world. We have these makerspaces in different locations. I’d love to see the democratization of the tools of biology I was talking about. It’s hard to know what are the systems, and the tools are hard to use. I’d love for those to be democratized enough that you could see each individual lab space using those tools to do something that was super-local, super-`relevant to whatever their community and culture was. We’re not just all using the same activity or the same technologies, but everybody has used them for their own community.
Angelica
We have one last question. We’re curious. Can people feel the effects of inventions from these spaces in everyday life?
Anja Scholze
Currently we think of science from a very Western perspective, right? Like “what is science?” is a very, relatively narrow, subset of how you can explore the world, and that’s a Western science perspective. And so a lot of times when we think about the science coming out of these in our daily lives, I’d say that a lot of the science that’s used in these community biomaker spaces is technology that can be used for really cool new modern innovations like synthetic biology inventions, and engineering bacteria to make diesel, or whatever. But also, using bacteria to produce a product they want. At its core it’s the same technology as fermentation, which is really easily accessible and used in these spaces a lot. And so people will have done some version of fermentation in a community biolab that I would say is in everybody’s everyday life. But at the same time, it isn’t a new invention of these spaces. Those are technologies and things that humans have used in a variety of cultures across the world for thousands of years.
Angelica
I love that.
Bey
I love that answer. What I really like about that answer is it keeps me curious about some of the ripple effects that we might see from the work that you’re doing. And that’s the whole point of this podcast, is just to remain curious and be curious. So thank you for that. Thank you so much.
Anja Scholze
Thank you all for being curious. I love it!
Angelica
Thank you.
Bey
I got to say, I’m always thrilled to hear accessibility really in any industry, but especially science. When she talked about the workshop not looking like glassware all over the place and the white lab coats, like, people are getting their hands dirty, that’s really cool.
Angelica
It’s cool to see everyone is a scientist all day, every day, in, everything that we do.
Bey
Right.
Angelica
But what she was saying is we are giving people even more materials than they thought that they could be around. Typically, there’s so much gatekeeping around science.
Bey
And to your point, I like that if you ask a question, guess what, neuroscientists, ask some more questions, see where it goes.
Angelica
And I think you and I are scientists at this point.
Bey
I’m absolutely a scientist.
Angelica
Okay. Me, too. [Laughter]
Angelica
Kendall Nichols is a Ph.D. graduate student at Penn Medicine, studying neuroscience, particularly concussions and traumatic brain injuries. She’s the outreach chair at the Ernest E. Just Biomedical Society at the University of Pennsylvania. The society aims to serve the professional development of black and underrepresented minorities. As outreach chair, Kendall Nichols developed relationships with established organizations like The Franklin Institute to further the mission outside of the University into the Philadelphia community.
Kendall Nichols
I’m Kendall and I am from Maryland. I was always an athlete. I love music. I play the saxophone. I love people.
Bey
So Kendall Nichols, you are a PhD graduate student at Penn Medicine and are currently working on a research project about preconditioning…?
Kendall Nichols
Yes.
Bey
…The brain for faster recovery after a concussion? Could you talk a little bit about your academic journey? What drew you to this?
Kendall Nichols
As I said, I played sports, so I was a D1 volleyball player.
Bey
Let’s go.
Kendall Nichols
And we always did all these things like stretching and these little small workouts to precondition our muscles so that if we get injured, the recovery is faster. But people would get concussions and you would be out for a long time. There was no way to really determine how long you’d be out.
Bey
And what’s the definition of a concussion?
Kendall Nichols
We hear it a lot, right? It’s actually not a term for a diagnosis. It’s more of a symptom. So a concussion is actually when your head is hurting after a force has been applied to your head. I was like, hmmm, we do this with every muscle but the brain. Is there a way that we can actually change our lifestyles to make sure that we can recover faster? And concussions affect everyone. They’re not just an athlete thing. They’re not just a military thing. You can get a concussion being in a car accident, you can get a concussion falling down. So I was like, this would help literally everyone!
Bey
What have you found so far in terms of things that you can do to precondition yourself?
Kendall Nichols
There’s more work after to make the recovery faster. So, for example, don’t eat fried food, don’t eat a lot of dairy, don’t eat a lot of sugar, because those things actually make the recovery longer. So they have an idea of what to do after, in terms of diet, or don’t work out too hard because that still takes brainpower. Don’t look at TV, but nothing before.
Bey
And Kendall, you’re really accomplished even in the young stages of your career and your research. You are the outreach chair at the Biomedical Society at the University of Pennsylvania, where you work to serve the professional development of black and underrepresented minorities. Can you talk about that? Why is that important to you? Why were you drawn to that?
Kendall Nichols
I love giving back, but also in general, there are not a lot of black people at the University of Pennsylvania. So it’s very important to me being in Philadelphia, where there are a lot of black people, that there’s not that disconnect. And to make sure that I’m actually connecting with the community that my research will impact one day. It’s not so much me trying to create things to do, but it’s like, oh, I know that the Franklin Institute has this workshop they’re trying to do, but they need some people behind it. So let me help provide that and really get that off the ground instead.
Angelica
As outreach chair, you develop relationships with organizations specifically like the Franklin Institute. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Kendall Nichols
Yes. Science education as a whole is not at the top. And then the public school education is a whole different thing to hop into. Right. So I reached out to the Franklin Institute because of the fact that they know about the education system. They have these connections. They’re part of trying to really build on this education that needs help, in terms of being enriched. And so we have a lot of black students who don’t really know what to do but want to do something. So I am trying to bridge that ga,p and trying to help them because one of the Franklin Institute, one of the things they told me is, “We want people of color as well. We want black people as well, so that the students that we’re working with, in the community, see themselves.”
Angelica
I wanted to ask, as you think about the future of biology, and in our world, we live in now, with so much innovation, why is it important specifically that diverse voices are represented, welcomed, and elevated in your field?
Kendall Nichols
Yeah. So I think it’s extremely important because there’s a perspective, right? Our cultures and our backgrounds just influence the way we think about these different questions. So that’s why I’m like, this is really important because it really is an individual perspective that affects that science, and that’s what I really want to see in biology. But that can’t happen if you just have the same experiences in the room.
Bey
You are so accomplished in the work that you’re doing early in your career. You also serve as the Black & Neuro chapters manager. Could you speak to your particular experience of being black in neuro?
Kendall Nichols
So actually neuroscience is one of the newest disciplines of science. There hasn’t been much foundation when it comes to building different communities. And so being one of the newest disciplines comes with a lot of fluidity, and people gatekeeping differently. There are a lot of black people who are like, “oh, I’ve never seen a black neuroscientist.” I had never seen a black neuroscientist until the founder. Her name is Angeline Dukes. And she was like, “Hey, we should try to get all the black people together and see if there’s a community.” And so she started that, and it was amazing because we were like, “where were you?! I’ve never seen you! You’re at the institution right down the street?”
Bey
Yeah.
Kendall Nichols
So that’s been really amazing, and it’s an international thing, and it’s been an amazing experience just to learn about these different people and learn about neuroscience. And again, neuroscience is one of the newest disciplines, so really, anything can be connected to neuroscience.
Bey
Yeah. And I’m sensing such excitement from you around these topics. Where is that coming from as far as sports, neuroscience, concussions, all these different things? You’re fired up. Where is that fire coming from?
Kendall Nichols
So I’ve always been curious as a kid, and I was always encouraged by my parents to just explore whatever I was curious about and whatever I wanted to try. And so the brain is just confusing to me. I think it’s crazy that we have to use our brains to study the brain. And I have a theory that the brain does not want us to know about the brain.
Angelica
Wait, go on about that. That’s what we want to hear.
Kendall Nichols
I’m convinced about that, that it’s like, keeping it secrets. But I love movement, I love sports. I love all of these things. And because I’ve been encouraged to just keep going after what I love, that’s really where the fire comes from, because I don’t think I have to choose one. I don’t think I have to choose sports over neuroscience, over music or any of those things. I think I can do them all. And so, of course, sometimes it’s a little bit much, but it really just keeps me excited and keeps me on my toes, and I always want to keep getting better and keep knowing. So that’s really where… I’ve just always been an excitable person when it comes to pursuing something that’s interesting to me. And again, my theory about the brain, I think it’s interesting. We’ll see if it unlocks its secrets, though.
Bey
Can you talk more about that? Because that is really funny. Is there any language that you’ve developed around the brain not wanting us to know about the brain?
Kendall Nichols
Well, there’s plasticity. And so plasticity is the concept that your brain adapts and changes [due] to different environmental reasons. So there’s been many theories, right, in Neuroscience, where they’ve made this concrete, “this is how the brain works.” And then, like, 20 years later, they’re like, “actually…”
Bey
That whole thing, we didn’t!
Anja Scholze
Yes, that’s not true. And I’m like, yeah, that’s because our brains actually know… And so they’re doing plasticity and changing. Yeah, yeah.
Angelica
And as the brain is learning about the brain, it might sense, like, “hm, maybe we can adapt and change,” you know what I mean? Around the new discoveries. Since you have such a fresh…. We’ve spoken to so many different kinds of people on this show, and it’s really amazing to be sitting with the future of it rather than someone… We have so many experts that are on, and people who have published all of these studies. And the truth is, sometimes I pitch them a question that’s like, “so with neuroplasticity and meditation, can we change our brains? Can we change with food?” A lot of young people, we’re trying to hack our brains with sort of taking the power into our own hands. So I guess what I’m curious about is you as, like, a person who’s beginning your career and who’s so excited about it. What specifically lights you up about this work, and where do you see your work going in the future?
Kendall Nichols
So what excites me, honestly, is the accessibility of it. Before… I feel like not a lot of people understand science, for a reason. A lot of people don’t understand it because they use language. The scientific community uses language that’s confusing. And so, how are you really going to understand the science if they’re using jargon? But I feel like there are more people like me now, who want to make this accessible to the community. And so now I’m excited about, maybe ten years from now, I can be in Trader Joe’s having a conversation about the brain. And they’re like, “Yes! Yes, I saw that!” And you’re like, “yes!” And so we’re all actually being able to understand what’s going on. And that’s really what makes me excited. That’s really why I do the outreach, because I just want us to all be able to have these conversations and not be confused or feel like it’s so far out of our league, or “that’s not for me.”
Angelica
And including outreach, but also, aside from that, what specifically in science are you interested in focusing on? And Where’s the terrain untapped?
Kendall Nichols
Yeah. So I want to focus on making, like, these treatments. So I want to create a treatment possibly around the idea of preconditioning, where, say it’s something that we take, and everyone can take it, and it can help us precondition for traumatic brain injury. That’s really what I want to do with my research. And the reason being is traumatic brain injury research, uh, treatment actually is extremely expensive. Normally somebody has to be in the hospital for a long time. That’s a lot of money. So a lot of people actually don’t report their TBIs, which is, the short term for Traumatic Brain Injury. And so, that causes more damage.
Bey
You’re saying, like, you have to sit in the hospital for, like, seven days to even get to the point of possibly having that treated? And seven days in a hospital could cost…
Kendall Nichols
Exactly. Insurance is a lot. There are so many reasons why you wouldn’t get treatment for your TBI.
Bey
Right.
Kendall Nichols
That’s really what I want to do with my research, is make it way more accessible, so that you don’t have to be rich in order to have access to this.
Bey
Why is it important for people to be on the same page and have that dialogue about science, and for everybody to use that same language that’s recognizable? Why is that important?
Kendall Nichols
That is extremely important because that means that we’re able to move forward as a society, and we’re able to actually provide opportunities for people and provide thought processes and perspectives in a space that was never allowed before. Academia and science were not created for me, as a black woman, to go and think and do this research. That was never their intention. However, I’m here, and I want to continue to broaden that and open that up so that we can continue to have different voices.
Bey
So you talk about being an athlete, you talk about being a minority. How are your other lived experiences? How does that influence your research?
Kendall Nichols
Yes. So I have, one: switched the different career paths that I wanted. So at one point, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be a medical liaison, which is a person who talks to researchers and doctors and tries to get them on the same page. I wanted to do a ton of things. And I think that’s what really influences my role in neuroscience, is because I see that I can technically be involved in all of these different things without choosing one track. And so that influences my neuroscience, and my research. But another thing is, my dad is an immigrant, and so he has a certain experience. And my mom grew up in Washington, DC, and so she grew up in a Metropolitan area. And I grew up in suburban Maryland. And so having an immigrant father and a metropolitan mother, seeing their different ways of thinking, the different ways of living, all of those different things, that’s another reason why I talk about accessibility so much, because I see how just where they lived affected how they think. I see where they live just affected how they move throughout the day.
Kendall Nichols
So I just feel like having all of those around me makes me want to connect with people that much more. And if my work doesn’t connect with people, I don’t really feel like I’m doing my job.
Angelica
Cool! Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming in.
Kendall Nichols
Thank you for having me. This was great.
Bey
Absolutely.
Bey
That was awesome. That was a lot of energy, a lot of fire, and a lot of information, too.
Angelica
It was amazing to see such a bright light in the science community. She’s going to do amazing. She already is. She is already doing amazing things. And I can’t wait to see what she does!
Bey
And I’m from Philadelphia, right here in the city, and she’s doing so much work and running around in the space to connect dots, as they say. Right. Like she’s a part of this UPenn institution in West Philadelphia and interacting with the community in a really real, genuine way.
Angelica
Yeah. There’s nothing like seeing someone doing what they’re really meant to do.
Bey
Yeah, absolutely. And I love how she wants to create that space where everyone’s talking about science. Because they have a question, because they’re interested, because they just have a better language to enter the space with.
Angelica
Yeah, totally. And also when she was talking about preventative care for traumatic head injuries, that being her passion. How specific, how helpful! I mean, it’s incredible.
Bey
It’s so interesting to me that the brain is well-known. We’ve been studying it, but it remains such a mystery, and we have all these practices with the rest of our body, in terms of preventative care. But our brain around concussions and traumatic injuries, it’s like, we don’t have much, and she seems fired up to figure it out.
Angelica
Yeah. I feel like she is. She’s going to.
Bey
She’s probably figured it out now, I think.
Angelica
Probably about right now.
Bey
Yeah.
Angelica
Hi. This is Angelica Pasquini from So Curious! You know what? We love making this show, okay? But sometimes they are great bits we just can’t fit them into the episode. We put together a bunch of great bonus content and you can find that available at beyond fi.edu.
Angelica
Thanks so much, Jayatri, and thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of So Curious!
Angelica
This podcast is part of The Franklin Institute. The Franklin Institute is a science museum located in Philadelphia. The Franklin Institute’s mission is to inspire a passion for learning about science and technology. For more information on everything about The Franklin Institute, visit fi.edu. This podcast is produced by Radio Kismet. Radio Kismet is Philadelphia’s premier podcast network for businesses looking to develop their own branded podcast content. Check them out at radiokismet.com. There are a lot of people who make this podcast happen. Thanks to the producers, Joy Montefusco and Jayatri Das. Our managing producer, Emily Charish. Our operations head, Christopher Plant. Our associate producer, Liliana Green. Our audio team, Christian Cedarlund, Goldy Bingley, Lauren DeLuca, and Brad Florent. Our development producer, Opeola Bukola. Our science writer, Kira Villette, and our graphic designer, Emma Sagar. See you next week.
