Metamorphosis: Stories of radical change

The Story Collider

In this week's episode, we bring you two stories of scientists experiencing radical change, whether at home or in 1980s Berlin.

Part 1: Nadia Singh decides she doesn’t want children, believing it will detract from her scientific career, but then her husband issues an ultimatum.

Part 2: Kinari Webb’s philosophy as a scientist is shaped by her experience of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a teenager.

Nadia Singh is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University and an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon. She earned her BA in Biology from Harvard University, her PhD in Biological Sciences at Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the genetics of evolution, and she relies primarily on fruit flies as a model system. Outside of work, she enjoys running (ok, jogging), cooking (ok, eating), drinking IPAs (no caveat here, it’s a true story), and playing board games with her two daughters (but not Monopoly because that game is awful and she doesn’t want to raise a pair of mercenary capitalists).

Kinari Webb first developed the vision for Health In Harmony when studying orangutans in 1993 at Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesia. There she encountered not only a beautiful and threatened natural environment but also the dire health needs of the people surrounding the National Park. After this experience, Kinari decided to become a physician and return to Indonesia to work together with local communities both to improve their health and to preserve the natural environment. She graduated from Yale University School of Medicine with honors and then completed her residency in Family Medicine at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, California. Kinari founded Health In Harmony in 2005 to support the combined human and environmental work that she planned in Indonesia. After a year of traveling around Indonesia looking for the best site for this program (unmet health care needs, forest that could still be saved and a responsive government), Kinari helped co-found the Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI, which means “harmoniously balanced”) program in West Kalimantan with Hotlin Ompusunggu and Antonia Gorog. She is also an Ashoka Social Entrepreneur and Rainier Amhold Fellow. Kinari currently splits her time between Indonesia and the US.

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