STEMcast

Fungi enthusiast and expert Dr. Shireef Darwish gives us a window into the third class of life on earth (after plants and animals) — fungi. After falling in love with these organisms early in his career, Dr. Darwish has experimented with all sorts of fungi-related work, including teaching, lab work, and even foraging for rare fungi (often to take home and eat!). In this episode, Dr. Darwish explains the ubiquitous role fungi play in the life cycles of both plants and animals, how these organisms can be used medicinally, and even the chemistry behind fungi-based hallucinogens.

In this episode of STEMcast, we join Dr. Nagissa Mahmoudi — a biogeochemist at McGill University — in exploring how microbes live and thrive in various extremes. We hear how Dr. Mahmoudi fell in love with biology, and how she spends her days now as an educator and researcher. She provides wisdom on how events such as oil spills can affect their ecosystems’ microbiomes, and we hear an expert’s predictions on the possibilities of life outside of Earth. All this and more on this episode of STEMcast.

In this episode of STEMCast, we will be diving into the world of artificial intelligence with Professor Aaron Courville, with topics spanning from Game Theory to Explainable AI. Prof. Courville is from the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal. He is one of the founding members of Mila and a Canada CIFAIR AI Chair.Alongside Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio, he co-wrote the seminal textbook on deep learning: aptly named Deep Learning. His current research focuses on developing deep learning models and methods, with a particular interest in reinforcement learning, deep generative models, and multimodal ML in the domains of language and vision.

In this episode of STEMcast, we explore Dr. Shuaiqi Guo's academic history as well as his research in adhesive surface chemistry and its relation to antimicrobial resistance. Dr. Guo is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at McGill University. He completed his education worldwide, starting at the undergraduate level at Mount Allison University, continuing into his Ph.D. at Queen's University, and finally in postdoctoral fellowship at Eindhoven University of Technology and Yale University. His current research is focused on combatting antimicrobial resistance through alternative methods focused on bacterial adhesion, which has particular promise in its ability to circumvent the speed of bacterial evolution by preventing binding in the first place.

In this special collaborative episode of STEMCast (McGill iGEM x UBC-Okanagan iGEM), we speak with Dr. Isaac Li, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Dr. Li's lab builds DNA-based molecular tools to study mechanobiology through single-molecule and quantitative imaging. These tools are used to better understand the cell-cell interactions involved in diseases such as cancer. Dr. Li was named UBCO Faculty Researcher of the Year in 2023. He also acts as the Primary Investigator for the UBC-Okanagan iGEM Team. Join us for this special episode featuring UBC-Okanagan iGEM's Human Practices Lead, Oluwatinufemi (Tinu) Tope-Awofeko.

Dr. Drew Endy is a synthetic biologist and professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He helped start new undergraduate majors in bioengineering at both MIT and Stanford. Twenty years ago Drew also helped launch the iGEM competition. As a group of students passionate about building with biology, it's a privilege to be able to speak with Dr. Endy.