24. Ten Epic Questions for Helen Turner, Part 2

It’s not often one gets to talk to a brilliant scientist about college admissions and Paul Tough’s book “The Years That Matter Most,” Ken Jennings vs. an artificial intelligence, an internship at Google vs. a Harvard undergraduate degree, Stanford University’s wondrous document “Uncharted Territory,” and the incredible insights of excellent indigenous science. Even better is the fact that I caught all of this conversation on tape and can present it here in this podcast. Dr. Helen Turner is the VP for Strategy and Innovation at Chaminade University, a small, private college sitting on a lovely hillside above the city of Honolulu. Her resume is 14 pages long; she is a brilliant thinker and articulate spokesperson for things in K-12 and higher education we should all be excited about. (And in a couple cases, such as CRISPR being driven “underground,” very concerned about.) She has a strong bias towards action and innovation. Over a 90-minute interview, which will be released in two parts, Helen and I dug deep into what I called Ten Questions With Helen Turner. Yes, in couple cases we cheated by adding in bonus questions! This recording was done in a special dual-person soundproof phone booth at the Entrepreneurs Sandbox, managed by the one and only BoxJelly Co-Working team. So enjoy, and please give us a rating in your favorite podcast store! From Chaminade.edu we learn: “Dr. Turner is an internationally-regarded researcher in molecular immunology. As well as her position at Chaminade, she holds academic affiliations with the John A. Burns School of Medicine and Department of Microbiology at the University of Hawaii and serves on numerous scientific advisory boards. She collaborates with an extensive network of scientists nation-wide and has trained numerous graduate students for careers as biomedical investigators, science administrators and academics. Previous to her Chaminade appointment, she was an Associate Director of Research at The Queen’s Center for Biomedical Research in Honolulu. Current projects in the Turner laboratory focus on mast cell ion channels as novel targets for therapeutic intervention in inflammatory pathologies, and on the molecular mechanisms by which cannabinoid compounds act as modulators of the immune system. Dr Turner’s relatively young laboratory has been strikingly successful at winning grants from private foundations (The Leahi Fund for Pulmonary Research, The Victoria and Bradley Geist Foundation, The Culpeper Biomedical Pilot Initiative, and the Queen Emma Research Foundation), and from Federal sources (National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institute of Allergic and Inflammatory Disease, and the Idea Network for Biomedical Research Excellence). In addition to her efforts in seeking funding for her own program, Dr. Turner acts as an invited grant reviewer for the NIH, the British Welcome Trust, and several other funding bodies. Dr. Turner trained at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories and received her Ph.D. from the University of London in 1998. Following a post-doctoral period at the Beth Israel Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, she assumed her position at Queens in 2000. While at Queens, Dr. Turner was head of a team of 10 scientists, whose efforts centered around the biology of mast cells. These immunocytes are central to inflammatory responses and are key players in pathologies such as asthma, eczema and multiple sclerosis.” For more on Dr. Turner’s work, go to Chaminade’s website. 

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