Meet the Microbiologist
160 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 34 ratingsWho is microbiology? Meet the Microbiologist (MTM) introduces you to the people who discover, innovate and advance the field of microbiology.
Go behind-the-scenes of the microbial sciences with experts in virology, bacteriology, mycology, parasitology and more! Share in their passion for microbes and hear about research successes and even a few setbacks in their field.
MTM covers everything from genomics, antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, emerging infectious diseases, microbial ecology, public health, social equity, host-microbe biology, drug discovery, artificial intelligence, the microbiome and more!
From graduate students to working clinicians and emeritus professors, host, Ashley Hagen, Scientific and Digital Editor at the American Society for Microbiology, highlights professionals in all stages of their careers, gleaning wisdom, career advice and even a bit of mentorship along the way.
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Episodes
MTS58 - David Baker - Crowdsourcing Biology
September 23, 2010 10:00 - 24 minutes - 22.4 MBIn this podcast I spoke to David Baker, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington. Baker and his colleagues study how proteins fold, taking on the complex shapes that make our lives possible. It turns out that protein folding is a fiendishly hard problem to solve, and even the most sophisticated computers do a poor job of solving it. So Baker and his colleagues have enlisted tens of thousands of people to play a protein-folding game called Foldit. I talked to...
MTS57 - Forest Rohwer - Curing the Corals
September 01, 2010 19:35 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBIt never occurred to me that the human body and a coral reef have a lot in common--until I spoke to Forest Rohwer for this podcast. Rohwer is a microbiologist at San Diego State University, and he studies how microbes make coral reefs both healthy and sick. Just as we are home to a vast number of microbes, coral reefs depend on their own invisible menagerie of algae and bacteria to get food, recycle waste, and fend off invaders. But as Rohwer writes in his new book, Coral Reefs in the...
MTS56 - Susan Golden - Clocks for Life
August 18, 2010 21:14 - 28 minutes - 25.7 MBIn this podcast, I talk to Susan Golden, the co-director of the Center for Chronobiology at the University of California at San Diego. We talked about Golden's research into time--in particular, how living things know what time it is. While you may have heard of our own "body clock" that tracks the 24-hour cycle of the day, it turns out that some bacteria can tell time, too. Golden has discovered how evolution has produced a molecular clock inside microbes far more elegant tha...
MTS55 - Nancy Moran - The Incredible Shrinking Microbe
August 04, 2010 17:34 - 52 minutes - 41.9 MBHow many genes can a species lose and still stay alive? It turns out, bacteria can lose just about all of them! In this podcast, I talk to Nancy Moran of Yale University about her fascinating work on the microbes that live inside insects such as aphids and cicadas. After millions of years, they have become stripped down creatures that are revealing some profound lessons about how superfluous most genes are--at least if you live inside a host. Recent Publications: Bacterial genes...
MTS54 - Carl Bergstrom - The Mathematics of Microbes
July 14, 2010 20:56 - 39 minutes - 36.6 MBIn this podcast I talk to Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington about the mathematics of microbes. Bergstrom is a mathematical biologist who probes the abstract nature of life itself. We talk about how life uses information, and how information can evolve. But in Bergstrom's hands, these abstractions shed light on very real concerns in medicine, from the way that viruses jam our immune system's communication systems to to the best ways to fight antibiotic resistance. P...
MTS53 - Bonnie Bassler - The Bacterial Wiretap
July 01, 2010 19:09 - 37 minutes - 34 MBIn this podcast I talk to Bonnie Bassler, a professor at Princeton and the president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology. Bassler studies the conversations that bacteria have, using chemicals instead of words, Her research is not only helping to reveal how bacteria work together to make us sick, but also how we might interrupt their dialogue in order to cure infections. Related Projects: Measurement of the copy number of the master quorum-sensing regulator of a bacterial ce...
MTS52 - Mitchell Sogin - Expeditions to the Rare Biosphere
June 17, 2010 18:11 - 42 minutes - 38.5 MBIn this podcast, I talk to Mitchell Sogin, the Director of the Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Wood's Hole, Massachusetts. Dr. Sogin is one of the leaders of an ambitious project to survey the microbes of the ocean--which total over 36,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cells. Using the latest DNA-sequencing technology, Dr. Sogin and his colleagues are cataloging microbes from all over the worl...
MTS51- James Liao - Turning Microbes into Fuel Refineries
June 02, 2010 17:21 - 26 minutes - 24.4 MBIn this podcast I talk to James Liao, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. I spoke to Dr. Liao about his research into engineering microbes to make fuel. Today, we get most of the fuel for our cars out of the ground. It's a process fraught with dangerous consequences, from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the rise in global temperatures thanks to greenhouse gases. Dr. Liao is among a growing number of scientists who think that ...
MTS50.5 - The Making of the Meet the Scientist Podcast
May 21, 2010 19:22 - 2 minutes - 49.2 MB VideoTo mark the celebration of Microbeworld's 50th episode of the Meet the Scientist podcast, we created a time lapse video that shows exactly what it takes to produce a single episode of the show. We hope you enjoy this behind the scenes look and we thank you for listening week after week. Cheers, to another 50 episodes!
MTS50 - R. Ford Denison - Darwin on the Farm
May 19, 2010 15:19 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBIn this podcast, I talk to R. Ford Denison of the University of Minnesota. Denison is an evolutionary biologist who's interested in how to make agriculture better. The ways in which plants thrive or fail are shaped by their evolutionary history, as well as the evolution that unfolds every planting season. We're most familiar with the evolution of resistance to pesticides in insects and to herbicides in weeds. But evolution has many other effects on farms. For example, many import...
MTS49 - Irwin Sherman - The Quest for a Malaria Vaccine: The First Hundred Years
May 05, 2010 17:14 - 54 minutes - 50.1 MBIn this podcast, I talk with Irwin Sherman, professor emeritus at the University of California at Riverside, about the century-long quest for a vaccine against malaria. Scientists have been trying to make a vaccine for the disease almost since the discovery of the parasite that causes malaria. Yet decade after decade, they've encountered setbacks and failures. We talked about why it's so hard to make a malaria vaccine, and how likely it is that scientists will ever be able to do...
MTS48 - Keith Klugman - Pneumonia: The Hidden Giant
April 21, 2010 15:24 - 26 minutes - 24.3 MBIn this podcast I talk to Keith Klugman, William H. Foege Chair of Global Health at Emory University. Dr. Klugman studies the disease that is the number one killer of children worldwide. If you guessed malaria or AIDS, you’d be wrong. It’s pneumonia. Two million children under five die every year from it every year--one child every 15 seconds. Dr. Klugman and I spoke about his research on how pneumonia causes so much devastation, its hidden role in the 50 million deaths in t...
MTS47 - Peter Daszak - Stalking the Wild Microbe
April 07, 2010 14:24 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBDr. Peter Daszak is a disease ecologist and President of the Wildlife Trust, an international organization of scientists dedicated to the conservation of biodiversity. He is a leader in the field of conservation medicine and is well known for uncovering the wildlife origin of the SARS virus. Dr. Daszak also identifed the first case of a species extinction caused by a disease and has demonstrated a link between global trade and disease emergence via a process called "pathogen pollution...
MTS46 - Curtis Suttle - It's a Virus World and We Just Live On It
March 24, 2010 17:09 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MBIn this podcast I talk to Curtis Suttle, a professor and associate dean at the University of British Columbia.Suttle studies the diversity and population of viruses across the entire planet. He has helped show that viruses are by far the most common life forms on the planet. They also contain most of the genetic diversity of life, and they even control how much oxygen we have to breathe. I talked to Suttle about coming to terms with the fact that we live on a virus planet, and how hard...
MTS45 - James Collins - Engineering Life: The Past and Future of Synthetic Biology
March 04, 2010 15:44 - 37 minutes - 34.2 MBIn this podcast, I talk to James Collins, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at Boston University. Ten years ago Collins helped launch a new kind of science called synthetic biology. I talked to Collins about the achievements of synthetic biology over the past decade, such as engineering E. coli that can count, and about the future of synthetic biology--from using bacteria to make fuel to reprogramming the bacteria in our guts to improve our health.
MTS44 - Michael Worobey - In Search of the Origin of HIV and H1N1's Hidden History
February 18, 2010 18:24 - 42 minutes - 19.6 MBIn this episode, I talk to Michael Worobey, an associate professor at the University of Arizona. Worobey is virus detective, gathering clues about how some of the world's deadliest pathogens have emerged and spread across the globe. Worobey and I talked about the harrowing journeys he has made in search of the origin of HIV, as well as the round-the-clock data-processing he and his colleagues used to discover the hidden history of the new H1N1 flu strain.
MTS43 - Rob Knight - The Microbes That Inhabit Us
February 03, 2010 18:24 - 52 minutes - 36.2 MBIn this episode, I speak to Rob Knight, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Knight studies our inner ecology: the 100 trillion microbes that grow in and on our bodies. Knight explained how hundreds of species can coexist on the palm of your hand, how bacteria manipulate your immune system and maybe even your brain, and how obesity and other health problems may come down to the wrong balance of microbes. Links to...
MTS42 - Julian Davies - The Mysteries of Medicine's Silver Bullet
January 20, 2010 21:04 - 23 minutes - 21.1 MBIn this episode I speak to Julian Davies, professor emeritus in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Davies is one of the world's experts on antibiotics. I talked to Davies about how the discovery of antibiotics changed the course of modern medicine, and how we now face a growing threat from the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We also talked about some enduring mysteries about antibiotics. Most of us think of antibiotics as ...
MTS41 - Sallie Chisholm - Harvesting the Sun
January 06, 2010 21:04 - 19 minutes - 16 MBIn this episode I speak to Sallie "Penny" Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT. Dr. Chisholm studies photosynthesis—the way life harnesses the energy of the sun. Plants carry out photosynthesis, but so do microbes in the ocean. Dr. Chisholm studies the most abundant of these photosynthetic microbes, a species of bacteria called Prochlorococcus. There are a trillion trillion Prochlrococcus on Earth. Dr. Chisholm researches these microbial lu...
MTS40 - John Wooley - Exploring the Protein Universe
December 23, 2009 21:04 - 24 minutes - 22.9 MBJohn Wooley is Associate Vice Chancellor of Research and Professor of Chemistry-Biochemistry and of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego. Wooley is a leader in the young field of metagenomics: the science of gathering vast numbers of genes from the oceans, soils, air, and the human body. A generation ago biologist knew the sequences of a few thousand genes. Since then that figure has jumped to several million genes and it's only going to continue to leap higher in ye...
MTS39 - Paul Turner - Pandemic in a Petri Dish
December 07, 2009 23:04 - 33 minutes - 22.9 MBIn this episode I talk with Paul Turner, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University. 2009 saw the emergence of a new strain of H1N1 flu. Scientists soon determined that the virus had leaped from pigs to humans and then spread to millions of people. When viruses make this kind of leap it's a reason to worry. In 1918 when a strain of flu leapt from birds to humans, 50 million people died in a matter of months. So far the new H1N1 flu strain is behavi...
MTS38 - Jonathan Eisen - An Embarrassment of Genomes
November 05, 2009 02:04 - 53 minutes - 36.5 MBJonathan Eisen is a professor at the University of California, Davis Genome Center. Over the course of his career, he has pioneered new ways of sequencing microbial genomes and analyzing them. I talked to Eisen about some of the weirdest creatures he's studied, such as bacteria that only live on the bellies of worms at the bottom of the ocean, and how we may be able to exploit their genomes for our own benefit. We also discussed the new movement for open access to scientific literature,...
MTS37 - Hazel Barton - Cave Dwellers
October 23, 2009 19:04 - 24 minutes - 22.4 MBHazel Barton is the Ashland Professor of Integrative Science at Northern Kentucky. She explores some of the world's most remote caves to study the remarkable diversity of microbes that thrive in their dark rececesses. I spoke to Barton about how she first became captivated by these bizarre organisms, what it's like to do delicate microbiology when you're hip-deep in mud, and why she wants to explore caves on Mars in search of Martians.
MTS36 - Dennis Bray - Living Computers
October 09, 2009 17:04 - 33 minutes - 27 MBDennis Bray is an active professor emeritus in both the Department of Physiology and Department of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He studies the behavior of microbes--how they "decide" where to swim, when to divide, and how best to manage the millions of chemical reactions taking place inside their membranes. For Bray, microbes are tiny, living computers, with genes and proteins serving the roles of microprocessors. In this interview, I talked with Bray about his provocat...
MTS35 - Michael Cunliffe - The Ocean's Living Skin
September 11, 2009 18:00 - 13 minutes - 15.4 MBMichael Cunliffe is a microbiologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Warwick in England. He studies the microbes that live in the thin layer of water at the very surface of the ocean. His research is shedding light on an ecosystem that's both mysterious and huge, spanning three-quarters of the surface of the planet. In this interview, I talked with Cunliffe about the discovery of this sea-surface ecosystem, and the influence it has over the Earth's clima...
MTS34 - Pratik Shah - Combatting Pathogens with Polyamines
August 28, 2009 18:00 - 9 minutes - 10.3 MBPratik Shah is a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, and he’s a 2009 recipient of ASM’s Raymond W. Sarber award, granted to recognize students for research excellence and potential. His research focuses on polyamines and polyamine biosynthesis and transport systems in Streptococcus pneumoniae. He’s studying polyamines with the goal of finding potential targets for pneumococcal vaccines and prophylactic interv...
MTS33 - Abigail Salyers - The Art of Teaching Science
August 13, 2009 17:34 - 21 minutes - 24.6 MBAbigail Salyers is a Professor of Microbiology and the G. William Arends Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her research focuses on the ecology of microorganisms in the human body and the comings and goings of antibiotic resistance genes, particularly genes in Bacteroides species. Dr. Salyers is ASM’s 2009 Graduate Microbiology Teaching Awardee. If you’ve ever tried teaching or mentoring, you know it’s not always easy, bu...
MTS32 - Arthur Guruswamy - Mycobacterial and Fungal Pathogens
July 29, 2009 21:00 - 10 minutes - 11.5 MBArthur Guruswamy is a clinical microbiologist in Virginia’s Department of General Services Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services and the winner of ASM's Scherago-Rubin Award in recognition of an outstanding, bench-level clinical microbiologist. His particular interest lies in mycobacterial and fungal diseases, including tuberculosis. In his work, Mr. Guruswamy places a lot of emphasis on helping others. A while back, he traveled to his native Sri Lanka to train clinic staff...
MTS31 - Frances Arnold - Engineering Microbes
July 15, 2009 21:00 - 12 minutes - 17.6 MBDr. Frances Arnold is a professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (most of us know it as Caltech). Dr. Arnold’s research focuses on evolutionary design of biological systems, an approach she is currently applying to engineer cellulases and cellulolytic enzymes for manufacturing biofuels. This country’s energy security can look pretty bleak when you think about it: the need to address global warming, strife in oil-rich nations, and d...
MTS30 - Stanley Plotkin - The Past, Present, and Future of Vaccines
July 01, 2009 19:10 - 13 minutes - 18.8 MBStanley Plotkin is Professor Emeritus at the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. A renowned vaccinologist, Dr. Plotkin is, perhaps, best known for developing a highly successful vaccine for rubella back in 1968. We are still using the same vaccine 40 years later. Dr. Plotkin has been honored with the inaugural Maurice Hilleman / Merck Award for his lifetime of dedication to vaccinology. For most people, rubella amounts to a bad rash and a crummy week, ...
MTS29 - Christine Biron - The Innate Immune System
June 18, 2009 13:24 - 16 minutes - 22.3 MBChristine Biron is the chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Brown University in Providence, and she focuses her research program on the mechanisms of the innate immune system – the body’s system of non-specific munitions for fighting off pathogens. Dr. Biron is also a newly elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. When a pathogen gets on or in your body, your innate immune system is on the front lines, working against the pathogen is a non-...
MTS28 - Joseph DeRisi - New Tech Approaches to Infectious Disease
June 02, 2009 15:34 - 16 minutes - 14.7 MBJoseph DeRisi is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research focuses on two distinct areas: malaria and new viral pathogen discovery. Dr. DeRisi is this year’s recipient of the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award, granted in recognition of fundamental research of unusual merit in microbiology or immunology by an individual on the threshold of his or her career. Discoveri...
MTS27 - Melanie Cushion - Pneumocystis carinii
May 14, 2009 18:34 - 24 minutes - 33.3 MBMelanie Cushion holds down two jobs: she’s a research career scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she’s also professor and associate chair for research in the department of internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Dr. Cushion focuses her research on the fungus, Pneumocystis carinii, which is a harmless commensal for most people, but a deadly pathogen for others. Pneumocystis carinii was shrouded in obscuri...
MTS26 - Ian Orme - Tuberculosis
May 07, 2009 18:34 - 23 minutes - 32.7 MBIan Orme is a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University, and his research focuses on the immune response to tuberculosis (TB) – a bacterial disease that most often infects the lungs. He's speaking at the American Society for Microbiology's Conference for Undergraduate Educators (ASMCUE). In the U.S., TB seems like a thing of the past. Here, public health measures and medical care have all but wiped out the threat from this inf...
MTS25 - Parisa Ariya - Bioaerosols | The Living Atmosphere
April 23, 2009 17:34 - 18 minutes - 26 MBParisa Ariya is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Chemistry Department at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Ariya works mostly in atmospheric chemistry, but she’s also done a good deal of work with bioaerosols and airborne microorganisms. She’ll deliver a talk at the ASM General Meeting in May titled Bioaerosols: Impact on Physics and Chemistry of the Atmosphere. Bioaerosols – microscopic clumps of microorganisms and organic debris – arise th...
MTS24 - Jeff Bender - MRSA in Animals
April 17, 2009 16:27 - 18 minutes - 26 MBJeff Bender is a professor of veterinary public health at the University of Minnesota, and his research interests lie in the intersection of animal health and human health, including animal-borne diseases of humans, food safety, and antibiotic resistant pathogens in animals. Dr. Bender will speak on “Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus ( MRSA) in Veterinary Practice” at the American Society for Microbiology’s General Meeting in Philadelphia this May. To a microorganism, vertebr...
MTS23 - Jo Handelsman - The Science of Bug Guts
April 10, 2009 16:10 - 18 minutes - 25.4 MBJo Handelsman is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she’s a member of the Department of Plant Pathology and chair of the Department of Bacteriology. Dr. Handelsman’s research focuses on microbial communities – their composition, how they’re structured, and how they work. Thanks to her work to improve the quality of undergraduate education, Dr. Handelsman is this year’s recipient of the American Society for Microbiology’s Carski Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award. ...
MTS22 - David Knipe - Herpes Simplex Virus 2 (HSV-2)
March 31, 2009 16:10 - 15 minutes - 22 MBDavid Knipe is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical school. A virologist, Dr. Knipe focuses his research efforts on the herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) – the virus we have to thank for genital herpes. An astonishing 20% of Americans have been infected with HSV-2, and whether they’ve had a recognizable outbreak of sores or not, they can still carry the virus. Once you contract the HSV-2 it lays low in your nerve cells, waiting for the right mome...
MTS21 - Andrew Knoll - Ancient Life and Evolution
March 17, 2009 15:30 - 20 minutes - 28.9 MBDr. Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard University’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where he studies ancient life, its impacts on the environment, and how the environment, in turn, shaped the evolution of life. In recognition of the 200th anniversary of Charles’ Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the first printing of his book, “On the Origin of Species”, the American Society for Microbiology has invited Dr. Knoll to deliver ...
MTS20 - Roberto Kolter - Bacillus Subtilis and Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms
March 12, 2009 15:30 - 23 minutes - 32.4 MBRoberto Kolter is a professor of Microbiology andMolecular Genetics at Harvard’s Medical School. Dr. Kolter’s research interests are broad, but he says his eclectic program boils down to an interest in the ecology and evolution of microbes, bacteria in particular, and on how these forces operate at the molecular level. Although he’s worked in a number of different systems, lately Dr. Kolter is spending a lot of time with Bacillus subtilis, a modest little bacterium that doesn’t get ...
MTS19 - Ellen Jo Baron - The Challenges and Rewards of Working in the Developing World
March 05, 2009 15:30 - 17 minutes - 24.1 MBDr. Ellen Jo Baron is a professor of pathology and director of clinical microbiology at Stanford University’s medical center in Palo Alto, California. A co-author of the authoritative Manual of Clinical Microbiology, Dr. Baron and her staff in the clinical lab evaluate and advise in the development of new diagnostic technologies. Dr. Baron has also volunteered her time as a microbiology advisor in numerous hospitals and clinics in developing countries since 1996. In a hospital, you ...
MTS18 - Elizabeth Edwards - Cleaning Up Solvents in Groundwater
February 25, 2009 15:30 - 26 minutes - 36.1 MBElizabeth Edwards knows that nothing is simple or easy when it comes to cleaning up toxic waste, but Edwards, a professor of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, is looking for ways to harness microbes to do our dirty work for us. Dr. Edward’s research focuses on the biodegradation of chlorinated solvents in the environment – the means by which microbes can actually make a living by eating our noxious waste. Chlorinated solvents like trichloroethylen...
MTS17 - Stuart Levy, MD - Antibiotic Resistance and Biosecurity
February 12, 2009 16:43 - 23 minutes - 21.6 MBIf you or someone you care about has ever had an antibiotic resistant infection, you know how dire that situation can be. Stuart Levy, a professor of microbiology at Tufts University in Boston, has centered his research around the theme of antibiotic resistance and he says there are few antibiotics in the pipeline for use on that inevitable day when our current infection-fighters are finally overcome. Dr. Levy is delivering the keynote address at ASM’s Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Re...
MTS16 - Paul Keim, Ph.D. - The Science Behind the 2001 Anthrax Letter Attacks
February 02, 2009 16:43 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBDr. Paul Keim is a professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, where his research program focuses on microbial forensics and the genomic analysis of pathogenic bacteria. As an expert in Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium responsible for anthrax, Dr. Keim participated in the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax letter attacks back in 2001. Microbial forensics is a field that developed in response to the twin threats of biological warfare and biological...
MTS15 - Kathryn Boor - The Science of Foodborne Pathogens
January 21, 2009 16:43 - 13 minutes - 12.5 MBDr. Kathryn Boor is a professor and chair in the Food Science department at Cornell University, where she’s director of the Food Safety Laboratory - a biosecurity level 2 laboratory that facilitates research on foodborne pathogens. Her particular research interests lie in the “how” and “why” of pathogens and spoilage microbes in food. Boor is also the director of the Milk Quality Improvement Program – a program funded by New York state to monitor and make recommendations to improve the...
MTS14 - Moselio Schaechter - Successful Science Blogging and Hunting Mushrooms
January 07, 2009 16:43 - 16 minutes - 15.3 MBMoselio Schaechter – known as Elio to his friends – is Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Emeritus, at the Tufts University School of Medicine, and he’s currently an adjunct professor at San Diego State University and at the University of California at San Diego. Dr. Schaechter has had a long career in bacteriology and has authored or co-authored a number of text books, and is a former president of the American Society for Microbiology. He lives in sunny San...
MTS13 - Video Supplement - Proteopedia Video Guide
December 31, 2008 16:43 - 4 minutes - 36.1 MB VideoThis is a video supplement to the audio podcast of Meet the Scientist episode 13 in which I interview Joel Sussman, Ph.D., a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The video shows Sussman's Proteopedia.org in action. It is narrated by Eran Hodis, the graduate student, who, together with Professors Jaime Prilusky and Joel L. Sussman developed Proteopedia at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
MTS13 - Joel Sussman - Proteopedia.org and Intrinsically Unstructured Proteins
December 31, 2008 16:43 - 15 minutes - 14.6 MBJoel Sussman, Ph.D. is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. In his research, Dr. Sussman is interested in elucidating the structures and functions of proteins, particularly those involved in the nervous system. He is also the lead scientist behind Proteopedia – a new online protein structure encyclopedia. Scientific endeavors have historically been a one-way street: an investigator or lab makes a discovery, then delivers the good news to the...
MTS12 - Nancy Keller - Aspergillus and the Fungal Toxin Problem
December 23, 2008 17:43 - 20 minutes - 19.2 MBNancy Keller is a Professor of Bacteriology and Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A mycologist, Dr. Keller works with a genus of fungi called Aspergillus – many of which are potent plant and human pathogens that produce deadly mycotoxins. Her research focuses on finding those aspects of Aspergillus species that make them effective as pathogens and toxin factories. Tiny fungi cause big problems for agriculture and human health, and the U.S. alo...
MTS11 - Daniel Lew - The Yeast Cell Cycle
December 08, 2008 17:43 - 12 minutes - 11.9 MBDaniel Lew is a professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and of Genetics at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. His research program focuses on cell cycle control in yeast, and how the cell cycle interacts with cell polarity. Yeast cells may look simple, but inside every little single-cell package lurks an intricate creature that senses and responds cunningly to its surroundings. Dr. Lew has uncovered many of the secrets of the tiny yeast, and since yea...