Lost Women of Science, a podcast created by Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf, is an initiative to bring the stories of women in science into the light, especially women scientists who have been overlooked or have not received the recognition that they deserved during their lifetime. A narrative podcast produced in partnership with Scientific American and PRX, the show delves into these stories and helps bring them to life. Each season is around four to five episodes – plus one bonus episode –is devoted to one particular woman in science and follows her life’s work and story. Its producer is Fieldston alum Sophie McNulty, from the graduating class of 2016.
Katie Hafner is the brains and creator behind Lost Women of Science and is the co-executive producer and host. Similarly, she is overly qualified to tell these stories, as she has been writing about women in STEM for over thirty years. Hafner is also currently the host and executive producer of Our Mothers Ourselves, an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers. Katie Hafner is a longtime journalist and frequent contributor to the New York Times, explicitly focusing on healthcare and technology. She has published six non-fiction books and is on track to release her first novel available this summer, titled “The Boys.”
Amy Scharf, Katie Hafner’s co-executive producer for Lost Women of Science, is a bioethicist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Amy is also the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Children’s Aid, a non-profit that provides comprehensive social, educational, and health services to children in NYC’s underserved communities. She is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts & Science.
Sometimes the path to historical restoration is indirect. Scharf had known a woman named Celia Ores, a pediatric specialist in New York City, whose medical mentor was Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the woman who is the center of the first season of Lost Women of Science. Anderson was a pathologist who discovered cystic fibrosis, and she had been talking to Ores, pleading to her about how she had never truly gotten the recognition she deserved for contributing to cystic fibrosis research. Amy Scharf heard about this story, mentioned it to Katie Hafner – as they are close friends – and proposed the idea of writing a book together about underrepresented women in science; however, they eventually decided on the creation of a podcast.
A former Fieldston graduate, Sophie McNulty, is the producer of the Lost Women of Science podcast series. Receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree in English at Stanford University, Sophie has always been passionate about the conjunction of both storytelling and science. Her distinct role includes structuring each episode, writing and editing episodes, helping create sound design, coordinating production schedules, and helping to manage the production team. Simply stated, McNulty describes her job as “going out and helping find these stories, help talk to people that know anything about these women or about the fields that they’re working in, and then kind of synthesize that into a narrative story.”
McNulty joined the Lost Women of Science team a little over a year ago and has worked with them ever since.
When discussing the ultimate decision on developing a book versus a podcast, McNulty said that podcasts are a “growing field where sadly the publishing industry is shrinking. I think there are pros and cons to both. And I think that science has many big dreams for the future. In terms of other things, we can do. There are talks about putting together a resource center with all the archival material that we’ve uncovered throughout our reporting, as well as potentially doing children’s books and things like that. So we’re not totally against doing anything written, we just haven’t gotten to it as of now”.
The Upper School Science Department Chair, Dr. Paul Church, was a mentor and inspiration for Sophie McNulty, who provided some advice on the project. Dr. Church was her teacher in ninth-grade biology, and she says, “ I kind of fell in love with biology, thanks to him. He helped me foster a love of science in a way that I had never experienced before. And I had him again my senior year, and that love just continued to blossom from my love of science, continued to blossom”.
Although she was not a science major in college, McNulty could still connect it to her love of storytelling. She studied the art of audio storytelling at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. McNulty has been able to share the lives of other scientists through her work on air on radio shows and various podcasts, such as Safe Space Radio, Knowing, Our Mothers Ourselves, and State of the Human.
Each season, McNulty gets to work on a project that tells stories that need to be told. She believes that they “haven’t really been told before stories that require real digging because there either isn’t much archival material or people threw them away, personal papers or people didn’t keep detailed records, even if there is or current material it’s often subsumed in the collection with a family members papers or husband’s papers more often than not. And so these stories, I think hopefully will help inspire, but they also, I kind of think will serve to correct her historical record and an understanding of who contributed what to different scientific accomplishments and innovation innovations”.
Beyond that, she feels that there is an urgency to talk about these women’s accomplishments, as there are only a few of them that are still alive. Moreover, the second season focuses on Klára Dán Von Neumann, a Hungarian-American computer scientist who died in her mid-eighties. McNulty finds that “it feels like those people that still didn’t know, knew these people and knew what they did are, are dying out. And so if we don’t tell them now, these stories could be lost in history forever, but these stories feel important”.
Dr. Church said that, at Fieldston, “Each teacher has made a formal commitment to increasing our DEI work in every course in the science department, but I think the idea of a “women in science” course would be a cool elective or even an “underrepresented people in science course “But things like the women in STEM club are also a great way to increase awareness and increase participation surrounding this topic by female-identifying students.”
McNulty loves all the work in which she is involved in. Whether that may be behind the scenes or hands-on, she takes something valuable away from each experience presented to her. “I love going to archives and this might be nerdy, but I like looking through archival material, getting to hold something that someone else holds, and see their handwriting. I feel like getting to look at archives of people’s personal collections feels like the pinnacle of excitement to a nosy person like myself because you get to see their diaries and to see like their pay stubs, everything, their tax forms are past four. Everything is there, and it’s waiting for someone to look through it and kind of find the story within”.
New episodes of Lost Women of Science are released every Thursday. The show is available free across all major podcast listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, and Amazon Music. If we want these influential scientists to be remembered and valued for their work, we must share their stories.
