Today it’s great to have Cara Santa Maria on the podcast. Cara is an Emmy and Knight Foundation Award winning journalist, science communicator, television personality, author, and podcaster. She is a correspondent on National Geographic’s flagship television series Explorer, and she is the creator and host of a weekly science podcast called Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria. Cara also co-hosts the popular Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, and hosts the new podcast Fixed That for You. Additionally, she co-authored the Skeptics Guide to the Universe book with her podcast co-hosts and is the spokesperson for National Geographic’s Almanac 2019. Cara is a founding member of the Nerd Brigade and cofounded the annual science communication retreat #SciCommCamp.
In this episode we discuss:
- The importance of studying the good death from a multidisciplinary perspective
- The challenges working with at-risk adolescent youth
- What it was like for Cara to shift focus from public science communicator to graduate school
- Cara’s focus on social justice and diversity within her clinical psychology research
- How depression and anxiety look different in different cultures and among different languages
- Barriers to accessibility to studying psychology through a social justice lens
- Cara’s personal hurdles as a woman in science
- Cara’s personal experience with Neil deGrasse Tyson
- The real meaning of free speech
- How #BelieveAllWomen and due process are not diametrically opposed to each other
- The importance of taking into account base rates when reasoning about the prevalence of sexual abuse
- The importance of being as unbiased as possible when encountering individuals
- Balancing #BelieveAllWomen with #NotAllMen
- The need for a multi-pronged approach to making social change
- What to do when social justice narratives conflict with the data
- The importance of existential-humanistic psychology
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