The Story Collider

In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers find themselves reckoning with the choices they’ve made—discovering how a single decision, whether made years ago or in the chaos of a crisis, can shape who we become and the responsibilities we carry.Part 1: When Misha Gajewski’s grandfather has a stroke while the rest of her family is out of town, she suddenly becomes the emergency contact.Part 2: After learning that her mother gave up on her dream of becoming a musician, Paula Croxson vows never to give up on her dream of being a scientist.Misha Gajewski is the artistic director and host of The Story Collider podcast. She is also a freelance journalist, educator, and copywriter. Her work has appeared on Vice, Forbes, blogTO, CTV News, and BBC, among others. She’s the co-found of the world’s first 24-hour True Storytelling Festival and a proud cat mom. She has also written scripts for the award-winning YouTube channel SciShow. Dr. Paula Croxson is a neuroscientist, award-winning science communicator and storyteller. She is a Senior Producer at The Story Collider and the President of the Board of Directors. In her day job, she is President at Stellate Communications where she supports academic and nonprofit science communication. Paula has an M.A. from the University of Cambridge and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. She was an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai for 5 years before shifting her career focus to science communication and public engagement with science, first at Columbia University and then at the Dana Foundation. She is passionate about communicating science in meaningful and effective ways, and fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in science. She is also a musician, playing flute in several rock bands, and a long-distance open water swimmer. The swimming is apparently for “fun”. You can learn more about her at paulacroxson.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode, both our storytellers come face to face with the growing power—and pitfalls—of artificial intelligence.Part 1: When AI takes over comedian Kyle Gillis’s job, he takes it personally. Part 2: While researching an AI model, engineer Omiya Hassan discovers one major problem: the amount of energy it’s consuming. Kyle Gillis is a Brooklyn-based comedian, musician, and Guinness World Record holder from Atlanta, GA. His stand-up highlights the contradictions of modern life—work that feels meaningless, a culture obsessed with productivity, and the absurd ways people cope with both. His act blends grounded emotional honesty with controlled chaos. Dr. Omiya Hassan, born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boise State University. She is also the principal investigator and director of her research lab, "LPiNS: Low-Power Integrated Circuits and Embedded Systems," where her team's primary research focuses on solving the energy-demand problem of Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerators and high-computation hardware. She completed her PhD in 2023 from the University of Missouri, focusing on building power-efficient AI hardware architectures for biomedical applications. Dr. Hassan also holds a professional degree in Music majoring in Vocal and Classical South-Asian Music. If you tune in to the national radio and national TV of Bangladesh, you might hear or see her sing the songs of Tagore. Besides teaching and researching at Boise State, you can find her hiking in the mountains, sharing cold sandwiches with her friends, or trying to ski but falling miserably with no shame during weekends. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode, like Icarus, both our storytellers fly a little too close to the sun—and learn the hard way that confidence doesn’t always equal competence.Part 1: As a kid, JR Denson is determined to master the art of homemade french fries—but then his kitchen experiment goes up in flames. Part 2: Faced with a looming Science Olympiad deadline, Adam Ruben is sure his last-minute “clock” made from a bag of water will do the trick.JR Denson --a Washington, DC native-- is a full-time college educator and a part time emergency medical technician (EMT). He has become increasingly involved in the DMV's storytelling scene ever since accidentally falling into right before the pandemic. JR has performed for both local and national storytelling organizations such as The Perfect Liar's Club, the Stone Soup Storytelling Festival, and NPR’s The Moth. Adam Ruben is a writer, comedian, and molecular biologist in Washington, DC. He writes the monthly humor column “Experimental Error” in the AAAS journal Science Careers and is the author of two books: Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School, and Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball. He has appeared on the Science Channel, the Food Network, the History Channel, the Travel Channel, the Weather Channel, Discovery, Netflix, and NPR and is a writer for the preschool cartoon “Elinor Wonders Why” on PBS Kids. Adam has performed on stage in 34 states and six countries, including two solo shows. He has told stories onstage with Story Collider, Story District, and Story League, and is a five-time Moth Story Slam Champion and a Lead Producer for the DC/Baltimore chapter of Mortified. He has three kids, two cats, and a day job as a molecular biologist for the US federal government that feels less secure every day.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s “Best Of” episode, we present two stories of people having to navigate a new world.Part 1: Sean Bearden has never been interested in education, but when he's incarcerated at the age of 19, he finds a passion for physics. Part 2: When Victoria Manning decides to get a cochlear implant, she fears losing her identity as a deaf person. Sean Bearden is a Ph. D. candidate in Physics at UC San Diego, researching the application and development of memcomputing systems, a novel computing paradigm. Identifying as a nontraditional student, Sean went from dropping out of high school to receiving the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. To alleviate the stress that is inevitably coupled with graduate research, he enjoys training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at the P5 Academy in San Diego. Visit seanbearden.com to learn more. Deaf from the age of four Victoria was raised in a family who instilled a high value on educational achievement and a strong sense of social justice. Victoria gained a bachelor degree in New Zealand (without the support of sign language interpreters) followed by a Masters degree in the United States before returning to New Zealand in the late 1990’s. Victoria’s deaf identity began in her close relationship with her older deaf brother, both raised orally, and later flourished in the New Zealand Deaf community and the culture-affirming experience of attending a Deaf university (Gallaudet) in the United States. Victoria’s first career was in psychology but she soon gravitated to human rights/disability rights work and moved into a series of strategic and policy roles across central government and NGOs. Victoria’s life highlights include being the key government advisor on the development of the New Zealand Sign Language Act 2006; representing New Zealand disabled people's voices at the United Nations in Geneva in 2014; and receiving a Queen’s Service Award for her services to the deaf and disabled communities in 2015. Most significantly, she appreciates the privileges and joys that come with being a wife and mother of two. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers look back on moments that might have deserved a little more drama than they got at the time.Part 1: When Jess Nurse feels a throbbing pain in her gut, she chalks it up to heartbreak. Part 2: When Maryam Zaringhalam’s physician mother goes in for brain surgery, everyone insists there’s nothing to worry about.Jess Nurse is a Boston born, NYU graduate and Los Angeles transplant. Her writing career began at the tender age of eight when she wrote a play about a horse, hosted a play reading and no one came. Devastating. She's still working through it. An actor as well, she has guest starred on several TV shows (Quantum Leap, The Resident, Danger Force) and regularly pops up on the commercials of those shows. Very meta. Very multiverse. Jess wants to thank her superhero friends, her Mom and Dad, her sisters Lizzy and Becky and her sweet niece Feather who is already cuter than the cutest Pixar baby. For more of her face and funnies: @jessisnotanurse. Maryam Zaringhalam is a molecular biologist by training who traded in her pipettes for the world of science policy and advocacy. She’s on a mission to make science more open and inclusive through her work both as a science communicator and policymaker. She’s a Senior Producer for the Story Collider in DC and previously served as the Assistant Director for Public Access and Research Policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2023 to 2024. She has a cat named Tesla, named after the scientist and not the car. You can learn more about her at https://webmz.nyc.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.