A surprise email leads a biologist to NASA.

Dr Karen James (@kejames on Twitter) is a biologist at the MDI Biological Laboratory, where she combines DNA-based species identification ('DNA barcoding'), with public participation in scientific research ('citizen science') to meet environmental research, conservation, and management needs. She is a co-founder and director of The HMS Beagle Project, a UK charity that aims to retrace the Voyage of the Beagle aboard a tall ship in support of science education and outreach.

Karen James: I Could Be an Astronaut

Part 1: Drew Prochaska decides to confront his fear of sharks -- by going swimming with them.

Part 2: Attorney Heather Cucolo must navigate the complicated psychology surrounding her sex-offender clients.

Drew Prochaska is a two-time Moth StorySlam winner, who has been featured on the "RISK!", "Dear Show", and Audible's "Stories in Session" podcasts.  A graduate of The Tisch School of Arts Dramatic Writing Program, Drew's writing was regularly featured on the website of Running with Scissors author Augusten Burroughs.  He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with his dog, Lula.

Heather Cucolo is an adjunct professor at New York Law School and the current director of New York Law School’s Online Mental Disability Law Program. She has contributed to the development of courses for the program as well as assisted in collaboration with Asia-Pacific partners to foster international distance learning. Her academic work has afforded her wonderful opportunities, such as addressing mental disability law issues at the United Nations and allowing her to travel domestically and internationally to lecture and teach.

Heather Cucolo's story was produced as part of a partnership with Springer Storytellers. Find out more at www.beforetheabstract.com/

Story Collider

Predators: Stories about confronting danger

Part 1: Born and raised in Brooklyn, naturalist Helen Cheng leaves the comfort of the city to venture out into the field.

Part 2: Ecologist Thom Young-Bayer makes the tough decision to leave science after his life changes course.

Helen Cheng is once a city-dweller turned solitude-seeking naturalist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Helen’s journey took her from the big city to the coasts of the New England, studying horseshoe crabs and receiving her M.S. in Zoology from the University of New Hampshire. Interested in how management plays a role in research, she worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a Sea Grant Knauss Fellow. As an interdisciplinary marine biologist, Helen works on a variety of projects involving research, education and outreach, and science communication. Whenever she gets a free moment, Helen enjoys eating new and delicious foods around the city, hiking in the mountains, swimming in the ocean, and singing and playing acoustic guitar. 

Thom Young-Bayer’s affinity for the outdoors developed into a brief career as an ecologist, during which he worked as a tropical forest guide, studied coral reef fish and kelp forests, and traveled to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Since then, he has managed two organic farms, worked on a commercial fishing vessel, sailed across the Pacific using celestial navigation, and worked as the First Mate of a Maine windjammer. He maintains his tenuous grip on sanity with open water swimming, ultra-marathon running, and classical piano. He lives with his wife, Skylar, and their two dogs in Maine.

Natural Habitats: Stories of finding where we belong

Part 1: As a grad student, Liz Neeley falls in love with the order of science, but when she heads into the field, she’s forced to confront messy reality.

Part 2: Criminologist Heith Copes gets close to his subjects when he studies meth users in rural Alabama.

Liz Neeley is the executive director of The Story Collider. She is a lapsed marine biologist who will always name her printers after fish. For the past decade, she has been helping researchers around the world understand the science of science communication and find the courage to tell more stories about their work. She is a member of the advisory boards of Ensia Magazine and the CommLab at MIT.

Heith Copes, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Justice Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has served as the President of the Southern Criminal Justice Association and has been a visiting professor at the University of Oslo, University of South Wales, Aalborg University, and the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research at Aarhus University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Tennessee in 2001. He is currently working with Jared Ragland on a photo-ethnography in rural Alabama. The project entails interviews, observations, and visual methods to document the lives of people who use methamphetamine in Marshall County, Alabama.

Heith Copes's story was produced as part of a partnership with Springer Storytellers. Find out more about Heith and his work on the Before the Abstract website: http://www.beforetheabstract.com/2017/03/01/caught-being-stupid/

In the Field: Stories about venturing into the wild

Part 1: Ecologist Evon Hekkala travels to Madagascar to help protect a village from a man-eating croc.

Part 2: Criminologist Stan Stojkovic receives a letter from an incarcerated man who killed two people when he was a teenager.

Evon Hekkala was born just outside of Fossil, Oregon, population 200. How she ended up living and working in NYC and traveling around the globe studying wildlife is all a bit of a big crazy fluke, set in motion by a mixture of really good, bad parenting and the naive ability to never see her own boundaries. Now she spends her time teaching and researching at Fordham University and the American Museum of Natural History where she and her students explore a century of change in the wild world of animals.

Stan Stojkovic, PhD is Dean and Professor of Criminal Justice in the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). He has been a faculty member within the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare for the past 33 years.  He received his Ph.D. in social science (with cognate specializations in criminal justice and criminology, public administration, and philosophy) from Michigan State University in 1984.

Stan Stojkovic's story was produced as part of a partnership with Springer Storytellers. Find out more at www.beforetheabstract.com/

Habitat Loss: Stories of changing environments

Part 1: On an expedition to Antarctica, journalist Alok Jha ends up trapped on the ice for days.

Part 2: Neuroscientist Rita Tavares attempts to analyze her romantic problems with science.

Alok Jha is a journalist, author and broadcaster, focusing on stories about science. He is the science correspondent at ITV News. Before that, he spent a decade at the Guardian and made programmes for the BBC. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.

Rita Tavares is a pirate born in the country of Portugal. She crossed the Atlantic ocean to make it to America, where she anchored her ship in New York City after a period in the Pacific waters off of San Francisco. She has a day cover working as a neuroscientist and a poet. In both these activities she keeps a facade of solving the mysteries of the mind scientifically and artfully. In her science job, she discovered that the human brain "sees" our social environment in ways similar to how it encodes physical space. She is now investigating how these processes go awry in patients with psychiatric disorders. In her poetry, she uses her pirate persona to write about her travels and her love of lunatics.

Isolation: Stories about loneliness

This week, we present two stories of learning experiences connected to early childhood, from an expert in maternal and infant health discovering the reality behind her research to a first-grader striving to be one of the "smart kids."

Part 1: Psychologist Amy Brown researches maternal and infant health, but when she has a child of her own, she’s confronted with the reality behind the research.

Part 2: As a first-grader, Cassie Soliday finds her coveted spot in the gifted class is at risk.

Dr. Amy Brown is an Associate Professor in Child Public Health at Swansea University where she researches experiences of becoming a mother, particularly around how babies are fed. She has published widely in how social, cultural and psychological barriers can damage breastfeeding and subsequently maternal wellbeing. Amy is fascinated by how culture defines motherhood, through pressurising mothers to have it all and enjoy ‘every precious moment’, whilst simultaneously devaluing their role. She also has three children of her own and switches between hearing women’s tales about becoming a mother and experiencing it first hand herself. Sometimes life feels like one long never ending ethnographic research project but offers her insight into these complex issues.

Cassie Soliday is The Story Collider's LA-based producer. In addition to being a producer, she is a writer, comic artist, and the love child of a poet and a parrot head.  She's an advocate for women in the arts and produces two podcasts, 'Ink and Paint Girls' and 'Jammiest Bits of Jam'. Afflicted with wanderlust and the desire to run away with the cat circus, she has three great and terrible ideas that could get her fired so she could do so.  She lives and works in California making cartoons. She is @cassiesoli and cassie@storycollider.org.

Early Childhood Development: Stories about growth

Whether we wear a lab coat or haven't seen a test tube since grade school, science is shaping all of our lives. And that means we all have science stories to tell. Every year, we host dozens of live shows all over the country, featuring all kinds of storytellers - researchers, doctors, and engineers of course, but also patients, poets, comedians, cops, and more. Some of our stories are heartbreaking, others are hilarious, but they're all true and all very personal. Welcome to The Story Collider!

Karen James: I Could Be an Astronaut

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