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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