The Science In Real Life Podcast

In this episode the host Nyasita Ondari has a riveting conversation with Dr Aneth David. Aneth David is an academic and research scientist in the field of biotechnology. She works as a lecturer at University of Dar es Salaam on the broad areas of biotechnology and bioinformatics. Aneth holds a PhD in Biology from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and has a background on molecular biology of research. She is a Bioinnovate Women in Science fellow where she is working to understand policies affecting research, innovation and commercialization of microbial products for agriculture. Aneth is a science communicator and advocate who envisions science taking a more prominent role in not only the daily lives in our community but also in policy development and decision making. When not in the lab or writing, she enjoys reading and spending time in nature. Find Dr Aneth on socials: LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneth-david-ph-d-a8335878/ Follow our podcast on other platforms: LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-science-in-real-life-podcast-hosted-by-laurah-ondari/?viewAsMember=true⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/ScienceIRLPod?t=ForJWTQ46fEh7dMx7YrdMQ&s=09⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://instagram.com/scienceinreallifepodcast?igshid=MTNiYzNiMzkwZA==⁠⁠

Welcome to Season 2 Episode 6! The Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita L. Ondari and BWCB founder Jenea I. Adams discuss Jenea's journey to founding one of the most impactful networks for black women in computational biology and her science career. Jenea is a creator, community architect, and computational biologist. Jenea is also a Janssen Oncology Scholar, Penn Presidential PhD Fellow, and PhD candidate in Genomics and Computational Biology. Experienced in developing and improving computational tools that leverage RNA biology for targeted cancer immunotherapy. Recognized community advocate for minoritized computational biologists. Check out BWCB: https://www.blackwomencompbio.org/ Check out the paper by BWCB: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010528 Find Jenea on socials: LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeneaadams/⁠ Follow our podcast on other platforms: LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-science-in-real-life-podcast-hosted-by-laurah-ondari/?viewAsMember=true⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/ScienceIRLPod?t=ForJWTQ46fEh7dMx7YrdMQ&s=09⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://instagram.com/scienceinreallifepodcast?igshid=MTNiYzNiMzkwZA==⁠⁠

Welcome to Season 2 Episode 4! The Science in Real Life Podcast’s co-host Sharon Otieno and Study abroad consultant Nduta Wambura discuss her journey from clinical nutrition to getting into tech, what you should know before undertaking your studies abroad, and student dilemmas (should i come back home after studies abroad or should i stay?). Nduta Wambura is a dynamic professional with a 12-year career that spans project and product management, health tech, study abroad programs, dietetics, and expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP). As a seasoned speaker, she frequently presents at international conferences and webinars, sharing her insights in various domains. In her current role at Google, Nduta excels as a Search Language Specialist, enhancing Swahili search experiences and advancing her skills in NLP. She has also made notable contributions in the hospitality industry, particularly with Airbnb's HotelTonight app in Portugal, and serves as an influential consultant and Erasmus Country Representative. Outside of her professional life, Nduta is passionate about cooking, puzzle-solving, traveling, and delving into audibles and podcasts Find Nduta on socials: LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/ndutawambura/ Follow our podcast on other platforms: LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-science-in-real-life-podcast-hosted-by-laurah-ondari/?viewAsMember=true⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠https://x.com/ScienceIRLPod?t=ForJWTQ46fEh7dMx7YrdMQ&s=09⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠https://instagram.com/scienceinreallifepodcast?igshid=MTNiYzNiMzkwZA==⁠

Welcome to Season 2 Episode 4! The Science in Real Life Podcast’s co-host Sharon Otieno and Regulatory Affairs, policy and Strategic Operations Manager, and One Young World ambassador 2023 David Odhiambo discuss David's journey into pharmacy and share some valuable advice to individuals interested in joining the field. Their discussion also touches on how to pivot into people engagement and policy among many more touchpoints on how to stand out and stay the course. Dr David Odhiambo is a pharmacist with a passion for and commitment to improving access to quality healthcare services for all and nurturing socially responsible generations through his vocation. He is a Regulatory Affairs Manager – Policy and Strategic Operations, East and Southern Africa Cluster at Novartis based in Kenya. He is a Board Member and Honorary Treasurer of the Kenya Association of Pharmaceutical Industry (KAPI) - a membership organization that represents the biopharmaceutical companies that through research invent and develop innovative lifesaving medicines.Odhiambo is the co-founder of Ryculture Health and Social Innovation, a social enterprise working with young people to tackle global health challenges including mental health, sexual reproductive health, and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in local communities in Kenya. He is also the curator of the African Pharmaceutical Network (APN) where he works with fellow pharmacists to bring together pharmaceutical industry players in Africa together for knowledge sharing, policy shaping, and innovation nurturing partnerships towards a robust pharmaceutical sector anchored on; reliable access to safe, efficacious and affordable quality medicines and pharmaceuticals services for the African people. Check out Ryculture: ⁠https://ryculture.org Find David on socials: LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-odhiambo-david-pharmacist01/?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app Follow our podcast on other platforms: LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-science-in-real-life-podcast-hosted-by-laurah-ondari/?viewAsMember=true⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/ScienceIRLPod?t=ForJWTQ46fEh7dMx7YrdMQ&s=09⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://instagram.com/scienceinreallifepodcast?igshid=MTNiYzNiMzkwZA==⁠

This is Season 2 Episode 3! The Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and Forbes 30 under 30 awardee and Ph.D. student Tolúlọpẹ́ Ògúnrẹ̀mí discuss how people interested in pursuing Computer Science can get started, founding Coders or Colour, how the Forbes recognition affected Tolúlọpẹ́ 's journey and mission in promoting diversity in tech among many more touchpoints. Tolúlọpẹ́ Ògúnrẹ̀mí is a PhD student at Stanford University in the Stanford NLP Group. Her work focuses on speech and language processing for low-resource languages, currently African languages. Before, she did a Masters in Speech and Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. Check out Coders of Colour: https://codersofcolour.org/ Check out Tolúlọpẹ́ 's impact feature on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/profile/tolulope-ogunremi/ Find Tolúlọpẹ́ on socials: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tolulope-ogunremi/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tolulopero Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tolulopero/ Follow our podcast on other platforms: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-science-in-real-life-podcast-hosted-by-laurah-ondari/?viewAsMember=true Twitter: https://x.com/ScienceIRLPod?t=ForJWTQ46fEh7dMx7YrdMQ&s=09 Instagram: https://instagram.com/scienceinreallifepodcast?igshid=MTNiYzNiMzkwZA==⁠

This is Season 2 Episode 2! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and Amathambo AI's co-founder and PhD student in Safe Learning for robotics at University College London, Sicelukwanda Zwane discuss robotics, its applications in the real world, and what you should know before getting into robotics. Sicelukwanda completed his undergraduate studies in computer science and applied mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He then pursued a master’s degree in computer science specializing in transfer learning and knowledge reuse in robotics at the same university. During his master’s degree, Sicelukwanda worked as a research assistant at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Mobile Autonomous Intelligent Systems department, where he was involved in research projects centered around the application of machine learning in robotics. After completing his master’s, he joined the Explore Data Science Academy as a data scientist and content creator, developing teaching material for business intelligence, database management, and machine learning. Sicelukwanda is currently a Ph.D. student at the UCL AI Centre under the supervision of Prof. Marc Deisenroth, working on representation learning for task constraints in the robotics setting. For further queries about robotics, reach Sicelukwanda here: linkedin.com/in/sicelukwanda Please subscribe to our podcast here and give us a follow on other social media platforms: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-science-in-real-life-podcast-hosted-by-laurah-ondari/about/?viewAsMember=true Twitter: https://twitter.com/ScienceIRLPod

This is Season 2 Episode 1!!! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and Evelyn Hones College's Biomedical engineer cum Lab instructor Muyanga Kampekete discuss what biomedical engineering is, its applications (especially within an African context), his work on building an AI-enabled low-cost digital stethoscope and navigating how to spot and acquire mentors. Muyanga is currently a co-researcher on a research titled ‘Development of an AI EnabledLow-Cost Digital Stethoscope’ which is funded by the National Science Technology Council of Zambia (NSTC).He is also a part-time Electronics Laboratory Instructor at Evelyn Hone College'sDepartment of Biomedical Engineering where he is involved in equipping students withpractical technical skills. He is professionally affiliated with the Engineering Institution ofZambia(EIZ). Muyanga has a goal of pursuing a Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering, specifically with a focus on biological signal processing.

Welcome to Season 1 finale! Its been an amazing season 1 and there is no better way to end it than a 'Get-To-Know-Your-Host'! On this episode, The Science In Real Life Podcast's Host and Founder, Nyasita Ondari is Interviewed by Marion Nyaboke to share on: - How we started and grew the podcast - A few lessons for beginners - The vision for The Science In Real Life podcast - A sneak peek into season two - Laurah's journey to science - What inspired the podcast We hope you enjoy it! If you'd like to be featured in Season 2 or would like to nominate someone, write to us at [email protected]! See you soon!

Welcome to Episode 9! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and Roam's senior electronic engineer Hampton Macharia discuss Hampton's engineering journey from intern to senior engineer, the state of engineering in Kenya, and the chaos in the real world that we ignore in school.

Welcome to Episode 8! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and University of Oxford postgraduate student Siobhan Mackenzie Hall, discuss Siobhan's journey from physiotherapy to computational neuroscience, fairness in AI and the Deep Learning Indaba. Siobhan is also a member of the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Student Labs which works to measure and mitigate societal bias in existing AI models. Notably, she is a qualified physiotherapist and worked in state-run hospitals in South Africa as a frontline healthcare worker before pursuing a Masters degree as part of the Biomedical Engineering Research Group at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Siobhan is an organizer of the Deep Learning Indaba, which is a grassroots movement with the mission to strengthen African Machine Learning and AI. Papers mentioned: A Prompt Array Keeps the Bias Away: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Adversarial Learning - This work provides a method for steering the model in such a way that concepts, such as the intelligence of a person, don’t change with respect to the person’s gender. Gender can be swapped for any protected attribute of interest. Balancing the Picture: Debiasing Vision-Language Datasets with Synthetic Contrast Sets - This work synthetically modifies a person’s demographic attribute - specifically gender in this work, using models like Stable Diffusion. This allows the development of a balanced dataset with men and women equally represented VisoGender: A dataset for benchmarking gender bias in image-text pronoun resolution - This benchmark helps to test models for gender bias in occupational settings and provides metrics against which can be tested for improvements. Other references: Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models by Laura Weidinger and authors from Google DeepMind which provides a framework for recognising representational and allocational harms in models Google’s Bard, which can be handy for helping with tasks supporting writing thorough documentation for code Andrew Ng’s The Batch is a newsletter that gives regular insight into AI advances as well as personal letters from Andrew Ng which helps shape ideas around how the developments of AI and how we can work to improve this for all The Deep Learning Indaba (https://deeplearningindaba.com/2023/) and the DLI mentorship program Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/(financial aid policy)

Welcome to Episode 7! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and Talarify founder, trainer, and consultant, Anelda Van der Walt discuss her journey through professions: from medicine to nursing to bioinformatics to farming back to bioinformatics and founding Talarify. They also talk about open science, rising unemployment in Africa, and how to use open science and open source to find opportunities that are sometimes paid. Find Anelda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneldavanderwalt/?originalSubdomain=za Check out Talarify: https://www.talarify.co.za/

Welcome to Episode 6! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and Open Life Science (OLS)/ Open Seeds Executive Director Yo Yehudi discuss open science, the founding of open seeds, and tracking opportunities in Open science. Find Yo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoyehudi/ Check out Open Life Science: https://openlifesci.org/

Welcome to Episode 5! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and Health Data Scientist Anita Makori talk about climbing the career ladder, mentoring young scientists, applying and getting into Oxford and Cambridge, and meeting world-renown Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Find Anita on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anita-makori/ Check out Anita Makori's youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AnitaMakori

Welcome to Episode 4! Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and University of Connecticut Ph.D. candidate in Polymer Chemistry Waithera Wambugu take on Breaking the Mold: taking a direct Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry, Synthesizing Polymers, Healing Minds, and Transforming Our World one polymer at a time. Find Waithera on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waithera-w-2645b515b/ Check out Anita Makori's youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AnitaMakori

Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and AfOx Kennedy Trust Prize Studentship Scholar Ruth Nanjala take on how to navigate the application process of competitive Dphils like those at the University of Oxford, how to approach potential supervisors and the science journey. Find Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-nanjala-17991117a/ Check out My Science Journey (MSJ): https://twitter.com/Journey2Science

Science in Real Life Podcast’s host Nyasita Ondari and the Erasmus Mundus Chemical Innovation and Regulation Program representative Sharon Otieno take on the art of applying for scholarships and chat about how to be a successful applicant. Find Sharon on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/41CTAKy Check out the Erasmus Mundus scholarship: https://bit.ly/3Ae1233

Science in Real Life Podcast's host Nyasita Ondari has a candid conversation with Michael and Pauline who are co-founders of the Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya initiative (BHKi). BHKi is a vivacious, well-coordinated, and enthusiastic hub that equips researchers in Kenya and across Africa with bioinformatics skills and training through creating awareness, collaborations, and capacity development. Learn more about BHKi at https://bhki.org/