The Story Collider

As we say goodbye to 2023 and ring in the New Year, this week’s classic episode is all about the novel. Part 1: Feeling isolated in her new job as a particle accelerator operator at Fermilab, Cindy Joe finds comfort in the friendship of her unconventional pet. This story originally aired on July 27, 2018 in an episode titled “Loneliness: Stories about finding friends”. Part 2: Actor Gail Thomas is invited to take part in a study testing mushrooms as treatment for depression in cancer survivors. This story originally aired on Dec. 1, 2017 in an episode titled “Psychotropic Substances: Stories about altered states”. Cindy Joe is an engineering physicist at Fermilab, America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory. She got her bachelor’s degree in physics and became a licensed senior nuclear reactor operator at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After starting at Fermilab, she worked as a particle accelerator operator for seven years before taking her current role with several experiments studying neutrino