Named for the beginning, the first, alpha elevates the voices of women in STEM: science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and the fields shaping what comes next. From early-career scientists and engineers to founders, researchers, and policy leaders, alpha features women who are asking harder questions, sharing what they’ve learned, and clearing the path for those who follow. Each episode goes beyond the achievement and into the story behind it: the choices, risks, failures, breakthroughs, and moments of becoming that shape a career at the edge of discovery. This podcast is for the firsts. The onlys. The originals. And the women rising next. Welcome to alpha.
Meet Dr. Finale Doshi-Velez. She went to MIT dreaming of building Mars rovers, and today she's building something with a different purpose: artificial intelligence that helps people make better decisions. From healthcare to humanitarian negotiations, Finale's work explores what happens when humans and AI work together, particularly when the stakes are high, the information is incomplete, and there isn't an obvious right answer. But just because a machine can make a decision, should it? T...
21 Oct 2026
What Every Scientist Should Know About Communication with Dr. Sara K. Yeo
Meet Dr. Sara K. Yeo. She started her career studying microbes in oceans and freshwater ecosystems. Today, she's still a scientist. She's just studying something different: people, and how we understand, trust, and respond to scientific information. That shift began when Sara noticed something unexpected. While she was excited to talk about the microbes she was studying, the people she met were far more interested in what her research meant for their everyday lives. It changed the question...
7 Oct 2026
Preparing for What Comes Next with Dr. Beth Cameron
Meet Dr. Beth Cameron. She’s been a molecular biologist, a science policy advisor, a national security leader, and one of the people inside the White House thinking about the next pandemic long before the rest of us knew it was coming. Beth has spent her career building what she describes as the smoke alarms of global health: the teams, systems, relationships, funding, and plans that need to exist before an outbreak becomes a crisis. Her path started in a cancer research lab, but Beth real...
23 Sept 2026
What the Most Underrated Sense Can Teach Us with Dr. Paule Valery Joseph
Meet Dr. Paule Valery Joseph. She grew up watching her mother be the community nurse. Now, at the NIH, her work helped reveal that losing your sense of smell was one of the clearest signs of COVID. But the nose can tell us much more than whether something smells good or bad. Certain diseases have odors. Changes in smell can offer clues about our brain health and aging. And sometimes, our senses are catching things that medicine is walking right past. This is a conversation about paying att...
9 Sept 2026
Who Gets To Shape Quantum with Dr. Shohini Ghose
Meet Dr. Shohini Ghose. She explores the quantum world already running your life, and recovers the women physics wrote out of its own story. Everyone agrees quantum will shape the century. Her question is who gets to shape it. This is a conversation about two kinds of invisibility: the invisible rules of the quantum world and the invisible woman who helped reveal them. Dr. Shohini Ghose shares what it was like to be one of the only women in the room, from feeling isolated and questioning he...
26 Aug 2026
What Ice Can Teach Us with Dr. M Jackson
Meet Dr. M Jackson. She’s been a geographer, glaciologist, writer, National Geographic Society Explorer, and TED Fellow, and whether it’s Greenland, Iceland, Antarctica, or the Arctic, Dr. M Jackson can be placed right in the middle of it and know exactly where she is. With only her crampons and ears attuned to the sounds of glaciers, M is able to define her position, as well as the state of the ice below her feet. This is a conversation about glaciers - What are they? What do they tell us...
12 Aug 2026
The Universe Belongs to Everyone with Dr. Renée Hložek
Meet Dr. Renée Hložek. She's an astrophysicist, cosmologist, professor, and bridge-builder. From studying the universe’s earliest light to its possible ending, to applying astronomy techniques to brain imaging, Renée spends her days asking some of the biggest questions imaginable, and making sure more people get the chance to ask them too. As a young girl growing up in South Africa, Renée's mother wasn’t concerned with perfect grades. Instead, she supported Renée with whatever she set her ...
29 Jul 2026
The World Needs Scientists with Dr. Gretchen Goldman
Meet Dr. Gretchen Goldman. She’s been the student, the scientist, the watchdog, the White House advisor, and now she’s the President of the Union of Concerned Scientists. 30 years ago, Gretchen was presented with a question by her 11th grade chemistry teacher: Where would science be if we changed data? This is a conversation about what happens when the facts become inconvenient, who pays when science is under attack, and Catharine presents Gretchen that very same question again. What Gre...
22 Jul 2026
Trailer: Welcome to alpha
You're about to hear from the women building what comes next. In cancer research and climate engineering. In AI, space exploration, public health, biotech, policy, and every room where the future is being shaped. This is alpha. A podcast about women in science, technology, engineering, and math - the fields defining our future, and the women redefining what leadership inside them looks like. I'm Dr. Catharine Young: a scientist, an immigrant, a mother, and a builder. For years, I've sa...
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