The Story Collider

Abhishek Shah takes a simple job to pay for school--toxic waste disposal. Being a biomedical engineer, Abhishek Shah knows everything about physics, chemistry and biology. He applies the same fundamentals to his stand up comedy and storytelling to improve the chemistry with audience by applying the physics of joke structure. His intriguing experiences and fascinating background makes him a unique storyteller. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brian Kennedy is forced to take a job in his local pharmacy to finance his theater dreams. Brian Kennedy is a writer/storyteller living in NYC. He's written for The Huffington Post and performed improv and sketch comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade. He tells stories on podcasts and at various venues, including The Moth -- where he's a StorySLAM winner. A long time ago, he wrote plays and produced them in the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Yes, he grew up in Minnesota. Yes, he still has the accent to prove it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Physicist Kaća Bradonjić's view of time is shaped by her experience as a war refugee. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Kaća Bradonjić is a theoretical physicist living and working in Massachusetts. Her research on the nature of space, time, and gravitation straddles the boundaries of science, philosophy, history of physics, and visual art. She is particularly interested in the relations between mathematical structures used in physics and the aspects of the physical reality they are supposed to represent. Kaća lives and works in Massachusetts, where she is currently a Visiting Lecturer of Physics at Wellesley College and an artist member at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Psychologist Ali Mattu didn't know what he wanted to be as a kid, but his older brother helped him find inspiration in Star Trek. Ali is a clinical psychologist at the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders where he specializes in the treatment of OCD, hair-pulling and skin-picking disorders. Outside of the hospital, Ali is an advocate for the brain and behavior sciences through his positions on national psychological associations and his presentations at comic cons. He writes about the psychology of science fiction at BrainKnowsBetter.com in the hopes that it will help others develop a love for psychology, just like Star Trek did for him. Ali's also the host of The Psych Show, a YouTube channel dedicated to making psychology fun and easy to understand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Anna Nicanarova pretends to be sick to get out of a test, but how far will she take the ruse? Anna Nicanorova is Director of Annalect Labs -- space for experimentation and rapid prototyping within Annalect. Anna is Co–Founder of Books+Whiskey meetup and volunteer with ScriptEd (Science Skill Center High School). She holds an MBA from University of Pennsylvania -- The Wharton School and BA from Hogeschool van Utrecht. Her life is very rigorously tracked and visualized through Annual Quantified Self reports. In her free time she can be found art-hunting in museums or climbing tall mountains (aspiring to finish 7 Summits by 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Used to the controlled uncertainties of his work, science writer Tom Levenson is forced to confront the dramatic uncertainty of whether he’ll be able to adopt a son. Tom Levenson writes books (most recently The Hunt for Vulcan) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits. His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others. By day he professes at MIT, where he directs the Graduate Program in Science Writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Adam Foote confronts the problem of obtaining sea urchins in land-locked Pittsburgh...during a polar vortex. Adam recently graduated with a Master's degree in Biology from Carnegie Mellon University, and he is very grateful to his sea urchin friends for getting him there. His first memory of science is when he took a long bath after a day in the woods and wondered why fingers prune up. When he is not explaining science to both willing and unwilling audiences, Adam enjoys cooking, which is chemistry for hungry people, and playing music, which is physics for the ears. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When he discovers his milk has been stolen from the dorm fridge, Neer Asherie has to resort to extreme science measures to find the culprit. Neer Asherie is a professor of physics and biology at Yeshiva University. He received a B.A. and M.A. in natural sciences (physical) from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He was awarded grants from the National Science Foundation to support his research on the self-assembly of globular proteins. His articles have appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review Letters, and Crystal Growth and Design. In addition to his scientific publications, Neer has authored a novel and several short plays. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rachel Pendergrass gets her dream job: talking to visitors in an aquarium, but dealing with the questions are not what she expected. Rachel Pendergrass is a storyteller, writer, actor, and science communicator native to the Atlanta area. She is a co-producer of WRITE CLUB Atlanta and the assistant director of the Dragon Con Science Track. She is the host of the new YouTube science communication comedy series Your Favorite Animal is A Dick. You can also find her performing at various live literature shows around town and on Dragon Con TV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Alan Guth is working on a fairly typical research paper, when he accidentally makes a huge discovery about the origin of the universe. Alan H. Guth is the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained in particle theory at MIT, Guth held postdoc positions at Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) before returning to MIT as a faculty member in 1980. His work in cosmology began at Cornell, when Henry Tye persuaded him to study the production of magnetic monopoles in the early universe. Using standard assumptions, they found that far too many would be produced. Continuing this work at SLAC, Guth discovered that the magnetic monopole glut could be avoided by a new proposal which he called the inflationary universe. Guth is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been awarded the Franklin Medal for Physics, the Dirac Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Isaac Newton Prize, the Fundamental Physics Prize, and the Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. Guth has written a popular-level book called "The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins" (1997). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.