COVID-19 special: The Microbiologist

Using bacteria to treat a disease like cancer may not seem very intuitive, but there are very smart reasons for doing so. No one knows this better than Dr. Pedro Correa de Sampaio, co-founder of Neobe, a company doing just that. No, the name isn’t a reference to the Matrix movies (for those of us old enough to remember them). It’s derived from “neo” as in new and “obe” as in the end of microbe, which makes perfect sense since they synthesize bacteria from scratch. We also talked to Pedro about traveling as a scientist, setting up his own biotech company and the need for science communication. Keep up with Pedro’s work and advances on Linkedin and check out the website for Neobe. We’re very much enjoying listening to Afonso Cabral’s album Morada, which you too can download from Bandcamp, or check out his website for more info about his music.

Have you ever just though how easy it would be to control everything with your brain? Poof, the lights go on, and Netflix just chooses your favorite show. Beyond these niceties though, Dr. Marvin Andujar has bigger and better plans.

It may feel like 2Scientists has dropped off the face of the planet since our last release, so we wanted to check in and let you all know where we’re at.

He’s here, he’s there; Dr. Hillman brings drug safety everywhere! So given the rules and regulations he needs to follow, the title “vigilante” could be nothing but ironic. We chart David’s progress through choosing pharmacology as a subject to study, and settling on pharmacovigilance as a career to pursue.

He conserves wild spaces, he climbs tall trees, he records flying amphibians. He is: Christian Brown – the Salamander Scientist! We talked about his graduate research involving dropping salamanders in a wind tunnel, watching hours of recordings to get his data, and his work outside the lab to save a local forest preserve.

Microfluidics is, as the name might imply, the study of small amounts of liquid. Now this may not sound super exciting until you hear Dr. Éadaoin Carthy talking about her field.

Chemistry and chemicals get a bad rap, but unfairly so. Certainly that’s the view of AP De Silva, someone who fell in love with the subject in his native Sri Lanka and who has continued a fruitful career in Northern Ireland.

That a doctor listens to their patients should not be a surprise, but that they use information from their patients to help improve care may well be. Enter Dr. Jason Wilson an emergency physician, a graduate trained anthropologist and a man with his finger on the pulse of many projects.

So with much fanfare, we launch our accompanying podcast 2Cientificos in Spanish! You’ll be able to find all future episodes on our new dedicated page, but for the bilingual among you, this is one to enjoy here and now.

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