Welcome back to This Person I Met! My name is Kayla, and I’m your podcast host.

I’ve known Salem for around two years now. Our shared trauma of endless marching band rehearsals and similarities with flute led to a quick, close friendship. You’ll hear in this interview that it’s clear Salem is one of the funniest people I know and their presence is immediate comfort to all their friends, including me. Not only do I consider Salem one of my closest friends and flute buddies, I look up to them for advice like they’re the village elder.

A few months after we first met and became close, I came to learn of their more personal struggles, as all friends do with time. Personally, I think that the most beautiful part of a friendship is when your comfortability evolves into openness and a mutual understanding that you want to listen and learn, and your closeness makes room to do so. As you’ll hear in this interview, Salem is very open about their diagnosis with depression and constant battle with their mental health, which would eventually lead to their hospitalization at the CS Mott’s psych ward. Their story is a consistent reminder to me that no matter what, you never truly know what somebody is going through, and to always check up on the people that you love. As a quick content warning, this episode will deal with topics regarding mental health.

Welcome back to This Person I Met! My name is Kayla, and I’m your podcast host.

There are more similarities between an electrician and a professor of mechanical engineering than you may think.

In our interview, Solomon Adera told me of his parent’s lack of education, and how their lack would inspire him to take advantage of any opportunity to learn and use it as a tool to climb upwards, even going as far as to get a postdoctoral from Harvard.

Solomon’s love of mechanical engineering didn’t start when he graduated with a PhD from MIT, pursuing a level of education greater than both of his parents combined, nor did it start when he first stepped foot into a school building. Instead, it started with his dad, a humble electrician pushing him to see education as a tool, and it continues through his legacy and mentorship that he offers as gratitude for having the chance to learn.

Welcome back to this person I met! My name is Kayla, and I'm the host of this podcast. The voice you just heard is professor Allen Liu from the University of Michigan. As you may have heard from the news, the scientific pipeline is facing a major crisis. Since January, the federal government has terminated over 1600 active research grants, worth roughly 1.5 billion, proposing a 37% cut to the National institute of health and a 56% cut to the National Science Foundation.

But, what do these numbers mean? To professor Liu, whose life has been built upon science, the numbers spell out a massive change for STEM. The future of research, determined by Liu, is uncertain. In this episode, he explains the numbers and their potential impact on generations of scientists to come, and raises the question of what really is at stake when you neglect the scientific pipeline.