Lady Scientist Podcast Jocelynn Pearl

“Science can only progress if others are able to read and build off of what has been learned in the past.” Jessica Polka shares this insight and many more in this conversation with LSP about the current state of scientific publishing. As the executive director of ASAPbio, an organization battling the slowing of the sharing of scientific knowledge, she’s played a key role in catalyzing change when it comes to how and when scientific articles are shared. We dive into the White House memo calling for all scientific papers to be open access by 2025, what some of her key concerns are for the space, and that explosive eLife announcement about preprints. You won’t want to miss this great conversation!
Links for Jessica:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessicapolka
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicapolka/
ASAPbio: www.asapbio.org

Dr. Vega Shah was was like a gold miner during her undergraduate and graduate school studies, except instead of panning for gold, she was searching the metagenomes of ocean samples for new life and new metabolic functions. What she found was a new species of ocean bacteria, but she also realized that the software tools she relied on and the databases she used to answer her research questions were anything but solid. After grad school, she shifted her career to building software for biologists at Dotmatics, integrating tools such as Prism into electronic lab notebooks. Today she’s a program manager at Benchling working to integrate new functions and communicate these resources to scientists everywhere. It's a thoughtful conversation you won't want to miss. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: https://rss.com/podcasts/ladyscientistpodcast/ Links for Vega Shah: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vegashah/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/dr_alphalyrae The Aliquot (her Substack): https://thealiquot.substack.com/ This episode is sponsored by LabDAO. Check out PLEX, an open source platform for running many of the latest and greatest new computational biology tools including DiffDock, RfDiffusion, and ColabFold. https://labdao.xyz/

Scientist & entrepreneur, Dr. Erandi De Silva, grew up in the small country of Botswana, where she lived through an HIV epidemic. Seeing scientists and epidemiologists having a direct translational impact on public health inspired her to pursue a career in science. She immigrated to the US to go to college, and went on to get her PhD and did an industry postdoc at Genentech before founding Forge Biologics. In this episode, we discuss what it's like running a company that has both a 'platform' in the sense that they are a CDMO - they make AAV products for other companies, and a 'product'; they also have a clinical product they are evaluating. Erandi De Silva on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erandi-de-silva-phd-08076222/ Forge Biologics: https://www.forgebiologics.com/ Leave us a comment if you enjoyed this episode. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

In this episode of Lady Scientist Podcast, Dr. Jocelynn Pearl hosts Emily McGinnis, Chief of Patient Advocacy at Taysha Gene Therapies, and Claire Aldridge, Chief Strategy Officer at Form Bio (spun out of Colossal Biosciences - the company that wants to de-extinct the dodo bird!) Together, we discuss challenges and advancements in gene therapy for rare diseases, emphasizing patient advocacy in drug development, and the need for optimization and scaling. Emily and Claire share their career journeys to the C Suite. They also recommend resources and organizations for patients seeking information on potential therapies. This episode provides valuable insights into gene therapy, patient advocacy, and the career journeys to the C Suite.

Dr. Madeleine Oudin knew she was interested in medicine and biology from a young age. She took a science track of courses in high school in France and went on to do her undergraduate studies at McGill University. Despite a lack of advising, she found that she loved research and continued on to get a Masters and PhD in neuroscience. She shifted gears in her postdoc, studying cancer and tumor biology, and was surprised to learn of some of the overlaps with studying neuroscience. These two fields merged to form her research niche when she founded her own lab at Tufts University. But her research focus would shift once again after she discovered the diagnosis of her daughter Margot, who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy caused by gene mutations in SCN8. Together with her husband, she now also studies these types of disorders in mice and is working towards a cure for her daughter. Join us on this episode of LSP to learn from Dr. Oudin's impressive career journey and her inspiring dedication to help her daughter.
Guest links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleine-oudin-56769529/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MadeleineOudin
Donate to Epilepsy Research: https://give.tufts.edu/campaigns/22193/donations/new?designation=scn8aepilepsyresearchfund
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Today we’re joined by another awesome scientist, Dr. Christine Cucinotta. Christine studies gene regulation in yeast in her postdoctoral studies in the Tsukiyama Lab at the Fred Hutch. She also organizes Fragile Nucleosome, a Discord community of scientists and researchers that puts on a seminar series (available to watch on YouTube). We chat about the importance of community in science and what she considers to be groundbreaking work in the field of gene regulation in the last decade. We also get into how she felt about the recent eLife decision to publish preprints (hint - she’s a fan of change!) and the importance of open science!
Christine’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrstn_e
Fragile Nucleosome: https://twitter.com/FNucleosome
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