Fusing Curiosity with Discovery: February 18 - March 5

Brian Malow (B.A. ’85) is a stand-up comedian and science communicator whose unique blend of comedy and science has been entertaining audiences from TEDx Berkeley to Los Alamos National Lab to the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Malow has appeared on Science Friday, Neil Tyson’s StarTalk Radio, the Science Channel, the Weather Channel and the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. You can see him currently streaming in the documentary “Science Friction” and on “The Unbelievable,” hosted by Dan Aykroyd on the History Channel. Malow has produced science videos for Time Magazine and Slate and written for Scientific American, American Scientist and Symmetry Magazine. He has worked with NASA, NSF, AAAS, NIST and many other acronyms, as well as Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Apple, Google and Microsoft. He’s been featured in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post. The California Academy of Sciences named Malow one of their inaugural Osher Science Communication Fellows. 

Melissa Kemp is an evolutionary biologist who uses the fossil record and historical data to investigate species responses to global change phenomena. Also appointed in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UT Austin, she earned her B.A. in biology from Williams College and her Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University, where she was a National Science Foundation (NSF)  Graduate Research Fellow, a Stanford DARE Fellow and a National Geographic Young Explorer. She then served as an NSF Environmental Fellow at Harvard University, where she completed her postdoctoral research at the Harvard Center for the Environment. There she investigated how past global change forces have altered species distributions in Anolis lizards, helping reveal population trajectories before, during and after environmental perturbations and providing a framework for evaluating future range shifts. She has served on the faculty of the Department of Integrative Biology at UT Austin since 2018, publishing widely on how vertebrate biodiversity and communities have responded to past environmental change—integrating conservation paleobiology, evolutionary ecology and paleontology to study extinction, diversification, colonization and trait-based responses to global change through deep time. Her research in Texas and in the Caribbean illuminates trends from the last 30,000 years that can shed light on major questions about the roles of climate and human migration in determining the fate of various species.

Karen Olsson is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her 2019 book, The Weil Conjectures, tells the stories of siblings André Weil, a mathematician, and Simone Weil, a philosopher, essayist, and spiritual thinker, interwoven with vignettes of other mathematicians’ lives and work. She is the author of two previous novels, All the Houses and Waterloo, and will publish a new novel in the fall of 2026, Dear Thorns. Her books have been recognized by the New York Times, PEN New-England, and the Texas Institute of Letters. As a journalist, she has explored a variety of politics, science, and human interest subjects, in pieces for Texas Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and other publications. She lives in Austin with her family.

Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has won numerous awards, including the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2010 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2019 Wolf Prize in Medicine, the 2009 Shaw Prize and the 2005 Gairdner Award. A professor at The Rockefeller University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute studying the physiologic and genetic mechanisms that regulate food intake and body weight, he and his laboratory in 1994 isolated the mouse ob gene. They demonstrated that it encodes the hormone leptin, which reduces food intake in mice. His current research is aimed at understanding the neural and physiological mechanisms by which leptin transmits its weight-reducing signal.