Category: Delving In

DELVING IN: Jay Wellons on Life as a Pediatric Neurosurgeon

8/28/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Jay Wellons MD, MSPH, a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic Surgery, Radiology, and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and University. He is Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery and Vice Chair of the Departments of Neurological Surgery and the Section of Surgical Sciences. He also co-founded and directs SOCKs, the Surgical Outcomes Center for Kids. He has published over 250 scientific and medical articles on all aspects of pediatric neurosurgery and is a recognized national lecturer and expert in fetal neurosurgery, the Chiari Malformations, brachial plexus surgery, surgical clinical outcomes research, and health care disparity. Dr. Wellons lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife Melissa, also a physician, two teenage children Jack and Fair, and dog Watney.

Today’s interview focuses on his recently published memoir, All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience. As the title suggests, the book recounts dramatic stories of pediatric neural surgery, but the book also conveys what it is like to live a life of high-stakes, heightened reality, emotionally viable through profound appreciation of patients and their parents, supportive colleagues, friends and family, and inspiring life lessons from his father.

DELVING IN: Peter Debenedittis on Facing the Problem of Alcohol-Related Deaths in New Mexico

8/21/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Peter Debenedittis, a decades-long advocate for substance abuse prevention. He has written 11 volumes of youth prevention lessons, and has been a motivational speaker across the country to combined audiences of over a quarter million students. Peter D. has consulted for the Centers for Disease Control, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the White House Office on Drug Control Policy.

Dr. Debenedittis moved to Santa Fe in 1995 and in 1999 launched a media literacy education firm specializing in substance abuse prevention. Having previously staffed a successful gubernatorial campaign in the U.S. territory of Guam and having, himself, run for Governor of New Mexico in 2018, he has honed the political marketing skills with which to address public health issues. He is the author of the Alcohol Literacy Challenge curricula, which aims to prevent underage and binge drinking. He also become a leading proponent for legislation that would raise taxes on alcohol as a research-backed strategy for reducing alcohol consumption in New Mexico. According to recent articles by Ted Alcorn of New Mexico in Depth, New Mexico is the state with by far the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths.

DELVING IN: Eve Fairbanks on Race Relations in Post-Apartheid South Africa

8/14/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Eve Fairbanks, a journalist and essayist who grapples with the processes and meanings of change: in cities, countries, landscapes, morals, values, and our ideas about ourselves. A former congressional correspondent for The New Republic, her essays and long-form journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Her reporting has been funded by grants from the Fulbright Program, the Institute of Current World Affairs, the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Writing Invisibility project at the Max Planck Institute. From a young age growing up in Virginia, Eve was transfixed by the moral questions raised by the Civil War and the unfinished changes in its aftermath. Drawn to also exploring racial tensions in post-Apartheid, South Africa, she traveled there on a Fulbright award, moving first to Capetown and then to Johannesburg, where she still lives. Her recently published book, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning is the subject of today’s interview.

DELVING IN: Jack Shlachter on His Two Professions, Los Alamos Physicist/Administrator and Rabbi, and on the Relationship Between Religion and Science

8/7/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Jack Shlachter, a Ph.D. physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for over three decades, also at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, as well as two organizations based in Vienna, Austria: the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Dr. Shlachter's training was as an experimentalist creating and diagnosing plasmas, high temperature mixtures of electrons and ions, with applicability to nuclear fusion, a potentially carbon-neutral source of nearly unlimited energy.

At Los Alamos, he served as Division Leader of the Physics Division and later of the Theoretical Division, the only individual to have held both roles in the history of the Lab. These positions involved the responsibility for budgets in excess of $100M and the management of hundreds of scientists, technicians, administrators, students, and postdoctoral assistants.

Dr. Shlachter is also a rabbi, having been ordained in 1995 by Rabbi Gershon Winkler of Cuba, New Mexico. He has held Jewish leadership roles both in Los Alamos and in Santa Fe, and well as serving as a visiting rabbi in Vienna and Beijing. In addition to his current pulpit in Santa Fe, he conducts lifecycle events – such as weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and funerals – under the banner of “Judaism for your nuclear family.”

DELVING IN: Camilla Townsend on Precolonial Aztec History and Culture

7/31/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Camilla Townsend, a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, whose scholarship focuses on indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and in the relations between natives and newcomers. She is deeply immersed in the study of Nahuatl, the Aztec language, particularly the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings left to us by Native American historians. Through the historical annals they produced, we catch a glimpse of indigenous conceptualizations of history as they existed at first contact. In 2010, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to in recognition of her work in analyzing the Nahuatl historical annals from the 16th and 17th centuries, written by the Nahuas (or Aztecs) in their own language, using the Latin alphabet taught to them by Spanish friars for the purpose of reading the Bible to more easily convert them to Christianity. Her 2019 book, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, won the 2020 Cundill History Prize.

DELVING IN: Loren Williams on the Origin of Life

7/24/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Loren Williams, a biophysicist, biochemist, astrobiologist, and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His research passions include the structural basis for macromolecular reactions, from the role of nucleic acids as targets of chemotherapeutics to the ancestral biochemistry of the ribosome during the origin of life. He is currently director of the NASA-funded Center for the Origin of Life (COOL) at Georgia Tech and a Co-Lead of the Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environment Consortium. In 2021, he was elected Fellow of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. Since 2008, Williams' research group has been focusing on the ribosome across the tree of life, constructing models of ancestral ribosomes by combining biophysical chemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics.

DELVING IN: Dawn Browning on Living with Diabetes

7/10/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Dawn Browning, a research ecologist at the Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, who studies the complex factors that link ecology with the characteristics of soil. Past scientific interests include tadpoles, rattlesnakes, and falcons. Dawn is also a yoga therapist and entrepreneur, who for 36 years and counting, has been living with Type 1 diabetes, viewing the disease as a powerful lens for self-understanding and personal growth. In 20 Dawn founded HolSol Wellness LLC to share her insights and well-honed tools to help others with their own personal development.

DELVING IN: Sarah Fay on her Memoir, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses

6/26/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Sarah Fay, a professor at DePaul and Northwestern Universities, a critic, scholar, and creative writer. Her writing has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, as well as many literary publications such as Bookforum, BOMB, and The Paris Review, where she served as an advisory editor. She is the recipient of many awards and prestigious writing residencies and is the author of the recently published memoir, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses and the founder of Pathological: The Movement, a public awareness campaign devoted to making people aware of the lack of scientific evidence for psychiatric diagnoses and the danger of identifying with an unproven mental illness. The book and the movement is the subject of today’s interview.

DELVING IN: Bob Delcampo on Family Therapy

6/19/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews Bob Delcampo, a professor emeritus at NMSU, who was the founder and head of the Marriage and Family Therapy program at NMSU for many decades, mentoring hundreds of therapists in training, writing two textbooks on marriage and family therapy, as well as many research articles about Work and Family Balance, while maintaining a private practice. In June of 2006, New Mexico Governor Richardson appointed him to the New Mexico Counseling and Therapy Practice Licensing Board, and Governor Martinez renewed his appointment when she took office. He served as chair of the state standards committee for Marriage and Family Therapists and as chair of the Ethics Committee for the NM Counseling and Therapy Practice Board for three years. He appeared regularly in KTSM-TV Newschannel 9 as their relationship expert and wrote a monthly column for The Heart magazine on effective relationships. In 2006, Dr. Del Campo was named “Centennial Laureate” in the College of Human Sciences at the Florida State University for being one of the top graduates in the 100 year history of that college.

DELVING IN: George P. Smith on Climate Change

6/5/2022

Stuart Kelter interviews George P. Smith, distinguished professor emeritus of biochemistry at the University of Missouri/ Columbia, who in 2018 was the co-recipient with Frances Arnold and Gregory Winter of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1985, he developed an elegant method known as phage display, where a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria with its genes – can be used to evolve new proteins. This method has led to a new pharmaceutical, Adalimumab (brand name “Humira”) for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Since retiring from the university, he has, among other topics, been teaching about global warming -- and the scale of societal changes needed to prevent the worst outcomes -- which is the subject of today’s interview.

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