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.

Welcome back to this person I met! My name is Kayla, and this is the second part of Johnny Walker's story. As you may remember from the last episode, Johnny served 46 years and 13 days in jail for armed robbery, and a second charge, murder. Now, as the reentry specialist for A Brighter Way, he helps former inmates, who just like he did, struggle to find their place in the world after incarceration. In this episode, Johnny will share his struggles readjusting to a quickly progressing society and his search for human connection and humanity in our technology driven world.

Johnny’s episode, for me, was truly eye opening. Hearing how long his sentencing was, longer than my parents have been alive, is something that I can’t even fathom. Still, I can’t imagine the time that incarceration took from him, time he cannot get back and he can only heal from.

And yet, Johnny has one piece of advice for this young generation.