David Hughes, the season’s first guest, started his career as an entomologist studying Cordyceps, the “zombie ant” fungi, but has pivoted to focus heavily on PlantVillage, which builds partnerships that empower people in lower-income countries to fight the consequences of climate change, with initiatives topics ranging from plant diseases to locust plagues to carbon sequestration. In 2021, Hughes was named Huck Chair in Global Food Security, included on Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” list and was dubbed one of “America’s Greatest Disruptors” by Newsweek. The U.S. Agency for International development recently granted him up to $39 million to co-lead a Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Current and Emerging Threats to Crops.
Other confirmed guests for season three include:
- Huck Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor of Biology Nita Bharti, who uses innovative techniques to map the relationships between the movement of human populations with the emergence and spread of pathogens through those populations.
- Brush Chair Professor of Engineering Steven Schiff, who used a $8.1 million “High-Risk, High-Reward” National Institutes of Health grant to develop new predictive models and more effectively treat infectious diseases in the developing world.
- Associate Professor of Anthropology Laura Weyrich, who is working through Penn State’s new Ancient DNA Lab to explore humanity’s ancient past.
- Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Xiaojun “Lance” Lian, who is working with novel technologies to improve and enhance the stem-cell differentiation toolkit to help make universal stem cells that won’t be rejected by patients’ bodies, and which could eventually reduce or eliminate the need for embryonic stem cells.
- Huck Chair of Functional Genomics and Professor of Biology and of Plant Science Sally Mackenzie, director of the Huck’s Plant Institute and a pioneer in plant epigenetics, who is working to establish a technological proof of concept for increasing crop plants’ yield by altering their epigenetics, with potential for both commercialization and for making crops more resistant to climate change without the use of controversial and highly regulated genetic modification.
- Associate Professor of Entomology and Biology Rudolf Schilder, who is working with Jean-Michel Mongeau and Shashank Priya to develop potentially foundational microchip-brain interfaces in moths, which could eventually be further developed for use in invertebrates.
“From our perspective here at the Huck, all the best and most impactful science comes out of people taking chances and trying new things,” said Huck Institutes Director Andrew Read. “Our communications team is dedicated to spreading this message by featuring some terrific researchers right here at Penn State who are already on that path. We hope this new series inspires others to do so as well.”
Episodes will be livestreamed on the Huck Institutes Website, and past episodes will join previous seasons in the archive on the Symbiotic Podcast website. The first season of the podcast, “Transdisciplinary by Design,” featured research teams with collaborators from diverse fields, to help understand how they come together, communicate and collaborate. Season two, “COVID-19 Research Briefs,” talked to scientists tackling various parts of the most disruptive event of the 21st century so far.
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