Further Together the ORAU Podcast

• From imposter syndrome to the Artemis Mission: A conversation with Chinmayee Govinda Raj, Ph.D., NASA Postdoc Fellow

  Chinmayee Govinda Raj, Ph.D., is a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow who conducts research for the Lunar Explorer Instrument for Space Biology Applications, or LEIA Project, at the NASA Ames Research Center. The LEIA Project will send microbes to the southern hemisphere of the moon on the upcoming Artemis II mission. Further Together host Michael Holtz talks to Govinda Raj about about her fellowship, and the fact that she is an outlier in her family. She says everyone in her family is an artist of some kind, and she wanted a change of pace. She knew from an early age that she wanted to work for NASA, but suffered from imposter syndrome. Still she took her journey one step at a time to get where she is today. Listen to the conversation to learn more. To learn about the NASA NPP, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html

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• Searching for the origins of life one RNA molecule at a time: A conversation with Alberto Vazquez-Salazar, Ph.D.

  Alberto Vazquez-Salazar, PhD, is a NASA postdoctoral fellow working at UCLA in the lab of Professor Irene Chen. He studies how life may have started on Earth by focusing on a molecule called RNA, or ribonucleic acid, which is a critical molecule that exists in all living things. His work is a part of astrobiology that explores how life began on Earth and how we might find signs of life elsewhere in the universe. In this episode of Further Together, Vazquez-Salazar talks to host Michael Holtz about how science has always seemed to be part of his life. Growing up in Mexico City, his mom, a botanist, kept books and plant specimens everywhere. “Science was just part of everyday life,” he says. “It was as normal as finding cereal in the pantry.” Listen to learn more about Vazquez-Salazar’s journey to NASA. To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Program and when applications open, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html

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• Making America healthy again will take all of us: A conversation with Brenda Blunt, senior director of health policy

  Brenda Blunt, ORAU senior director of health policy, is passionate about the connections between nutrition and both physical and mental health. She is a mom, grandmother, wife, nurse, primal health coach, farmer and policy wonk. Blunt says all of those roles together make health and how we can better care for ourselves important to her. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, rolls out his plan to Make America Healthy Again, much of the focus is on the role of better nutrition and its connection to health. Blunt was MAHA before it was cool, and often leans into the teachings of Florence Nightingale, who advocated for a holistic view of health that emphasized the importance of fresh air, clean water, efficient drainage, cleanliness of patients and care areas, and sunlight. In this conversation, Blunt and hosts Michael Holtz and Matthew Underwood discuss how we got to being one of the richest countries in the world and one of the least healthy, how we didn’t get here overnight, how government agencies can work together to help Americans make better choices, and how we can individually and collectively take steps to make ourselves and the country healthier.

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• So much left to discover: A conversation with Ben Hord, PhD, NASA Postdoctoral Fellow

  Looking up at the night sky can make anyone feel small, but for Ben Hord, Ph.D., a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow, looking at the sky is also a reminder of how much there is left to discover, and how many people can be part of that journey. Hord is in his second year of his Fellowship, working on the Pandora SmallSat mission. Set to launch in fall 2025, Pandora will study at least 20 exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, and their stars to figure out what their atmospheres are made of. In this episode of Further Together, Hord discusses his research, his career trajectory, how he became a scientist and more. To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Program and when applications open, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html

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• Science and art are two sides of the same coin: Ali Hyder, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Fellow

  Ali Hyder, Ph.D., was raised in a family of artists and is himself a musician, which seems a far cry from his research modeling the hydrodynamics of the surfaceless planet Jupiter but he believes art and science fuel each other. Science is also art because you have to be creative in a specific way, he says in this interview for Further Together: The ORAU Podcast. Hyder takes a deep dive into why modeling Jupiter's hydrodynamics is important for better understanding Earth, as well as how he became interested in science and the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship and to apply for the next application cycle, visit https://npp.orau.org/

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