The Story Collider

In this week's episode, our storytellers' lives and careers in science are shaped by a great loss in their lives. Part 1: When neuroscientist Macayla's partner is diagnosed with brain cancer, she's forced to make some tough decisions. Part 2: When Anant Paravatsu struggles in school, his mother comes to his rescue. Macayla is a recovering academic neuroscientist who just lost their spouse to brain cancer, and lost a career she had worked a long time for at the same time. She has a really cute dog if you need a pick me up after that bummer of a sentence. Anant Paravastu holds bachelor's (MIT, 1998) and Ph.D. degrees (UC Berkeley, 2004) in chemical engineering. His Ph.D. research with Jeffrey Reimer focused on using lasers to control nuclear spin polarization in the semiconductor GaAs. From 2004 to 2007, he worked as a postdoc at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at NIH with Robert Tycko, where he learned to apply nuclear magnetic resonance to structural biology. Paravastu's early structural biology work focu