Deep Convection

In this episode, Adam talks to Arto Lindsay for a second time. The first time (The Sumner Files, Episode Five) was remote, when Arto was in Brazil and Adam in NYC. This time, a few months later, Arto was in NYC and came by to look at Sumner’s archive and talk about it. Arto himself appears in the archive, in multiple ways — for example, the drawing shown above (8.5″x11″, ink on paper), one of many that Arto did as part of the Jack Texas collective with Sumner and Rudolph Grey. This interview was recorded in November 2024.

Adam is...

Adam talks about the crisis in U.S. science and higher education that is unfolding now, due to the multi-pronged assault on both by the second Trump administration. This episode was recorded on June 19, 2025. It’s a special one-off episode of Deep Convection, not part of The Sumner Files.

Media articles mentioned in the episode include:

New York Times article by James Glanz.

Guardian op-ed by Colette Delawalla, Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider, Michael Mann and Brian Nosek on the “Gold Standard” executive order.

After this episode was recorded but before...

Photo by Alon Koppel.

Connie Burg, aka China Burg, Don Burg, and Lucy Hamilton, had never played the guitar before she joined Mars. But that didn’t stop her from developing a uniquely original style that became a defining feature of Mars’ sound, and that in turn influenced all the No Wave music that came afterwards. Connie went on to learn another brand new instrument, the bass clarinet, for Sumner’s opera, John Gavanti, and then she kept playing it in her later projects, including Don King (with Mark Cunningham and others), The Drowning of Lucy Hamilton (with L...

In Adam’s memory, Sumner’s life is divided into the pre-Sue and Sue eras, with Sue being Susan Lehman, aka Sue Crane, aka Aunt Sue to Adam and his sister. Sue came originally from California, moved around in her youth, wound up in New York by the mid-1980s, and met Sumner sometime around 1990, right when he moved up to the Catskills for a few months to take care of his dying father. Not too long after that, they moved in together to her place in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Sue worked as a middle school earth science teacher, Sumn...

Cynthia Sobel, born Cynthia Schoenwetter, is Adam’s mother, and Sumner’s sister. So she knew Sumner from the very beginning of his life to the end, and there’s no one else alive who remembers the things about him that she does. She talks at length about their parents, Charles and Sylvia Schoenwetter, and their childhoods in Elmhurst, Queens — essential context for understanding Sumner’s life and art — as well as her memories and reflections about Sumner as an adult, and their relationship. One example: in 1963, Sumner took Cynthia and her husband (Adam’s dad, Gerry Sobel) to see Bob Dylan...

As the front man in DNA, Arto Lindsay was one of the core No Wave figures from the start, and he and Sumner were good friends from the mid-1970s, when Arto arrived in NYC (along with Mark Cunningham and Connie Burg, from Eckerd College in Florida), into the 1980s and beyond. Arto played on Sumner’s opera record John Gavanti, and in the early 1980s Arto, Sumner and Rudolph Grey formed a visual art trio, signing their separately-made works with the single name Jack Texas (with which Sumner continued to sign his own paintings for the rest of hi...

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with painter David Reed. David’s paintings have been shown in galleries and museums in the US and Europe from the 1970s to the present, in venues including the Guggenheim, Gagosian New York and Basel, Neues Museum Nürnberg, Häusler Contemporary, Zurich, and most recently at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris. David’s work is abstract, and as critic John Yao wrote in 2020, ““At the core of Reed’s project is the brushstroke.” David got his start in 1960s and 1970s New York, and one can see the influence of graffiti, f...

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Lydia Lunch! Lydia is a singer, poet, writer, actress, and self-empowerment speaker. She got her start as the leader, singer and guitarist of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, one of the four bands to appear on the compilation No New York, and moved on from there to a long career in which she’s managed to maintain the raw intensity and outsider quality that she started with. Her later projects include the bands Beirut Slump, 8 Eyed Spy, among many others, and then a long solo career, as well as ma...

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with photographer and graphic designer Julia Gorton about her experiences in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s, and they share memories of Sumner. With Rick Brown, Julia produced the fanzine Beat It in the late 1970s, and that got her into shows free so that she could photograph people at CBGBs and Max’s and so on. She became friends with the no wave bands, and with Sumner in particular, joining adventures with him and Rudolph Grey, such as interviewing catholic schoolgirls in Brooklyn, and recording them for posterity. Many years la...

In this first proper episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Mark Cunningham, the bass player in Mars and one of two surviving members of the band. Mark also played brass instruments on John Gavanti, and that record was released on Mark’s own label, Hyrax. Mark has had a long career since then, with bands including Don King, Raeo, Convolution, Bestia Farida, and Blood Quartet, as well as two recent solo albums, Odd Songs and Blue Mystery. Adam and Mark talk about Mark’s life and career trajectory, including a detailed chronology of Mars from start to end...

This episode launches a new series about the artist and musician Sumner Crane (1946-2003). Scientist Adam Sobel — Sumner’s nephew, and the host of this series as well as the podcast Deep Convection, out of which it grows — introduces the whole thing, explaining who Sumner was, why he (Adam) is doing this, and how it came to be.

Image credit: collage with photo of Sumner Crane, by Julia Gorton.

Shortly after Hurricane Otis hit Mexico in late October 2023 after a very rapid (and poorly forecast) intensification, Adam sat down with Frank Marks from NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) for the last episode of this season. Frank is one of the central figures in the world of hurricane science. With a career spanning over four decades at the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Frank has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of hurricanes and improving their forecasts.
Frank’s journey with HRD, including two decades as its director, has been dedi...

Bjorn Stevens’ main scientific interest is in the role of clouds in the climate system. He established himself early in his career as a leader in the study of marine stratus-topped boundary layers. That eventually led him to a broader climate research agenda. And since about 2008, Bjorn heads one of the world’s most prominent climate modeling labs, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. In that position, with his team there and many collaborators, he has produced an enormous volume of important research, and that’s not to mention the countless additional studies that use the data his la...

Adam answers listener questions!

In this episode we take a break from guest interviews. Instead, Adam explains in detail how the podcast got started, how and why we do it, and who is involved. Just like when you go to any web site or anything and there’s an “About” link, this is that, except via 40 minutes of talking.

Arlene Fiore got interested in air pollution first as a kid in the Boston suburbs, partly because she suffered from bad asthma, and that taught her that the air can be harmful. Even though her interest in the Earth’s atmosphere was there from an early age on, the path that led her to her current position as a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences was, in her own words, a circuitous one, partly because of life’s inherent unpredictability and coincidences, but also because of Arlene’s wide array of interests. When it came to...

Aglaé Jézéquel’s journey began surrounded by books, in a home where knowledge was cherished. Aglaé shared her parents’ passion from an early age on, but while her family was more into literature, she fell in love with science. Her academic path has led her to her current position as a scientist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she does research spanning climate science and social science. She is not a climate scientist whose work extends into social science, or a social scientist who collaborates with climate scie...

Sarah Kapnick’s journey in the climate world has not been a conventional one. Starting as a “math nerd in the Midwest”, her path meandered through investment banking, back to academia for a PhD., and now to one of the most influential positions in US climate science and policy – Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Sarah’s initial foray into the world of finance might seem unorthodox for a climate scientist, but in reality, it was a preview of the broader understanding she would bring to the field. At Goldman Sachs, she learned how to str...

Growing up outside Braunschweig, just on the west side of the border with East Germany during the Cold War, Tapio Schneider spent a lot of his teenage years doing sports, and skiing (often just meters away from the East German border patrol) became a large part of his life.
He also had a keen interest in science and a desire to understand the world around him, and so he decided to study physics and math—he did that at the University of Freiburg, a school he picked in no small part due to its close proximity to the Bl...

In keeping with this season’s excursions away from Deep Convection’s traditional focus on climate science, this episode features Abhisheik Dhawan. While he’s not a climate scientist, his innovative ideas intersect with climate change, development, and finance in a unique way. He is currently a Sustainable Finance and Partnerships Specialist at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), an organization that focuses on providing essential financial support to the world’s least developed countries.

In that role, Abhisheik is responsible for coming up with innovative mechanisms for providing sustainable finance to the world’s poorest countries...

Bob Kopp’s academic roots lie in the realms of paleoclimate, paleobiology, and ecology. But, inspired by a legacy of public service passed down from his parents, he soon gravitated towards areas where science meets actionable change. Over the course of his career, he has learned to master the dance of blending use-inspired, policy-oriented research with traditional academia.

Today, Bob is a professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University, but that role is just one of many hats he wears: He is also Co-Director of the University Office of Climate Action, and he di...

In the second episode of this season, we’re branching out from the traditional, science-centered sphere of Deep Convection and into a world captured through the lens of Manila-born photojournalist, Hannah Reyes Morales. Hannah and Adam crossed paths a dinner at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, where they found themselves immersed in a discussion sparked by shared interests: the relentless typhoons that shape life in the Philippines.

From a young age, Hannah was enchanted by the vibrant pages of National Geographic magazines at her home in Manila. A career as a photographer for su...

Rebecca Morss’ scientific credentials are impeccable – a PhD in atmospheric science from MIT, more than 20 years of experience at the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and currently the Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the center. But what really sets Rebecca apart is her focus on the intersection between scientific information and its use by people.

Rebecca is an expert in weather forecasting systems and risk communication, and she specializes in high-impact weather including hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Her research isn’t limited to the intricacies of weather phenom...

It’s been almost a year since our last episode, and we’re thrilled to announce the arrival of Season 4! In our season opener, Adam and Melanie reconvene, checking in on each other’s lives and exploring some detours—much like in previous seasons, this is the warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Convection.

Expect an array of diverse guests, each contributing a unique perspective to our ongoing exploration of the interwoven tapestry of climate science, humanity, and our shared experience of this moment in history.

Until then, stay tuned and be sure to hit t...

Gabe Vecchi’s research spans a remarkably wide range of topics: he started as an oceanographer, and studied intraseasonal variability in the Pacific, before moving to the Indian Ocean, and then, when he moved to Princeton in the 2000s, to a range of atmospheric problems, including a critically important paper on the influence of global warming on the tropical Walker circulation. And then Gabe got into hurricanes, a topic on which he’s been a key player for a decade and a half now.

He has made important contributions not just on those topics, but on a dizz...

In-Sik Kang’s career in climate science started about half a century ago, and it has been remarkable in many ways—scientifically, but also in that In-Sik has spent most of his life in a country that started from very little, in climate science and every other way, having been devastated by war right at the start of his life.

In-Sik is a long-time global leader in climate modeling, climate variability, seasonal climate prediction and atmosphere-ocean interaction. He built a large and amazingly successful group over several decades as a professor at Seoul National University. At SNU, he a...

Born to a space physicist father, Andy Dessler was steeped in science and academia from birth. Unlike other children of successful academics, he never perceived his father’s profession and the implicit expectations put on him as a burden, but soon decided that science was what he wanted to do as well.

Andy describes how his career was strongly influenced, at many critical junctures (including where to go to grad school) by his dad. So this keeps with a little theme of parents and children that we seem to have this season.

Andy and Adam ar...

Growing up on Long Island, Sandra Yuter loved to go on field trips—she learned about how glaciers had shaped the environment around her and was fascinated by how the resulting landscape still told the history of its geological past. The combination of scientific exploration and imagination that these field trips offered was something Sandra also drew to science fiction, another passion that she shares with Adam.

Sandra has turned her interest in science into a career; she is a distinguished professor at the department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University. Her re...

Chris Bretherton gravitated towards math and science as soon as he could read, which was at the tender age of three. His interest was probably the result of both genetics and family upbringing: Chris’ father is Francis Bretherton, a brilliant scientist who made important theoretical advances in fluid dynamics. This gave Chris big advantages, but he also talks about the shadow his dad cast over his career and the need he had to prove himself.

“There are actually several other examples within our own field of father-son pairs who were relatively well-known. […] So it’s not actually that unc...

Jane Baldwin has just completed her first year as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine. Her combination of interests is non-traditional, at least for someone coming up through the places and programs that she has. For one thing, Jane does straight up climate dynamics. One of her recent projects, for example, is about how mountains affect various aspects of the tropical climate.
But Jane also has a strong interest in how climate affects people, and that leads her in some diverse and interdisciplinary directions. One thread of her research involves extreme heat events, and in...

On her website, Kate Marvel describes her research like this: “I study climate forcings (things that affect the planet’s energy balance) and feedbacks (processes that speed up or slow down warming). Our work here has shown that observational estimates of the Earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases are probably biased low: assuming climate changes will be small is not a very good idea. We’ve also shown that human influences are already apparent in global drought patterns, cloud cover, and in the timing and amount of regional rainfall.”

You can tell from that summary that Kate, besides be...

Kelly Hereid had never heard of reinsurance companies when she got recruited by one while attending a scientific conference. A quick Google search brought some clarification, and in the years since, Kelly has become an expert in the field of catastrophe modeling. This type of modeling was developed mostly in the private sector, driven by the need of reinsurance and insurance companies to quantify the financial risk from natural disasters such as tropical cyclones or earthquakes.

In her current role as head of a research and development team at Liberty Mutual, Kelly needs to understand both the...

Ousmane Ndiaye’s path to becoming the director of Senegal’s national meteorological service was an unlikely one: Born in Senegal as the youngest of 10 children, he lost his parents at a young age and was raised mostly by one of his sisters. That sister was deeply committed to her little brother’s education, and Ousmane ended up being the first in his family to start high school. But that was just the beginning of an academic career that led him from Senegal to Algeria, and then to the US, where he started a PhD at Columbia University.

At C...

To climate scientists, Isaac Held probably needs no introduction. He is one of the deepest and clearest thinkers in the field, and his insightful research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate has earned him immense amounts of respect and appreciation.

Isaac spent most of his long and distinguished career until his retirement in 2020 at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, one of the pioneering centers for climate modeling. He was born in 1948 in a refugee camp in Germany, from where his family emigrated to the United States just a few years after. Isaac’s fath...

It’s been a while since we released the last episode of Deep Convection, but Season 3 is finally here! We are starting the season with a “prologue episode” featuring Adam and Melanie. Adam asks Melanie how her life has changed since their Deep Convection conversation that was recorded 2.5 years ago (and, spoiler alert, some aspects of it have changed in quite unexpected ways), and Melanie asks Adam  how his views about life and the world have changed, and what role the podcast has played for him.

Mostly though, this really is a warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Co...

When Shang-Ping Xie entered middle school in his home town about 300 miles southwest of Shanghai, China had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous political movement launched by Mao Zedong that had dominated Chinese life for a decade in the 1960s and 70s. That was lucky timing and a big turning point for Shang-Ping: If he had been a few years older, he might have been sent to the countryside after graduating from high school, to work on farms and learn about the rural life. But after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the universities reopened and...

Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, George Philander had to follow a lot of laws that didn’t make sense to him, e.g., that he was not allowed to stand in the line for white people at the post office. When he discovered mathematics and science, he was happy to have found a world that was governed by rational and coherent laws.

“South Africa […] was a strange place because of the apartheid policies. I basically lived in two worlds that didn’t really intersect. The one was the social world, which was subject to these strange...

Suzana Camargo is one of the world’s leading experts on tropical cyclones — a type of storm that includes hurricanes — and their relationship to the climate. When she first started to do research on hurricanes, she thought it was only going to be a one-year project. But life is unpredictable, and so

“[…] and then 20 years later, here I am, still doing hurricanes.”

Suzana’s path to the hurricanes had not been a straight one: She began her academic career in plasma physics, and only moved into atmospheric science after giving up her job as a tenured profes...

Nadir Jeevanjee is one of those rare people who have both depth and breadth in their skills. He is probably the only person who ever wrote a textbook about tensors and group theory while taking a few years off from grad school to tour with a rock band, and that fact alone should make you want to listen to this interview.

Nadir was born and raised in Los Angeles, and when he was 12 or 13, he got obsessed with music, especially with drumming. Towards the end of high school, he joined The Calling, a rock band that had...

Fran Moore, an assistant professor in Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, works at the intersection of environmental economics and climate science. She studies the impacts of climate change from an economic and societal perspective — how to quantify these impacts, and also how people and communities adapt.

Fran grew up in London, but moved to the US for college, in part because she wanted to do “something a little bit broader” than what continuing her science-focused academic track in the UK would have allowed her to do. This desire to look at things holistically and from an int...

Before Marshall Shepherd was bitten by the weather bug, he wanted to be an entomologist. But as luck would have it (at least for the fields of weather and climate science), Marshall changed his sixth-grade science project from honey bees to weather prediction after he had found out that he was highly allergic to bee stings. That science project marked the beginning of Marshall’s passion for weather, which has led him to become professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.
Marshall is particularly well known for his work on urban weather and climate, whe...

On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the plane were collecting, but she was also aware that the storm’s impact on New Orleans would be devastating. This experience made her realize at a visceral level that science alone is not always enough:

“And so it was that campaign which also made me realiz...

Brian Mapes fell in love with cumulus clouds when he was looking out an airplane window during his first flight, on the way to Iowa to toil in the fields with his uncle. He was struck by their beauty, but also wanted to understand them scientifically. 

In particular, Brian got interested in how clouds, which are relatively small, are related to weather systems that are much larger, and which is controlling which, how and to what degree. He took issue with the (then-)predominant idea in the field that turbulent convection and clouds are merely a p...

Vishal Vasan, an applied mathematician at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore, India, thinks of himself as a “mathematical salesman”, who uses his mathematical tools and expertise to help potential collaborators in other fields. Vishal’s particular interest are problems involving partial differential equations,
their properties and behavior, and methods for solving them, whether on paper or on the computer.

“This is at least my personal view of applied math. It’s a service. I help other people. I helped people with their homework problems when I was a kid. And I help my co...

Sulochana Gadgil has had a life-long fascination with the Asian monsoon, the seasonally shifting wind pattern driving the rain storms which are the lifeblood of India’s agricultural economy. Born in Pune, she studied mathematics in India and the USA – at Harvard and MIT – before returning to India, where she was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore from 1973 until her retirement a few years ago. 

Sulochana is one of the world’s leading experts on the monsoon, and she has made enormous contributions to its understanding. She has never shied away from questioni...

Deep Convection is back with a new season! Starting next Tuesday, February 2nd, we will release a new episode every other week.

In this prologue to Season 2, which was recorded two weeks ago, Melanie asks Adam about his experience making Deep Convection; they look back at the past season and ahead to the upcoming new season. We’ll say this much: Season 2 starts in India, and it features 10 wonderful guests who share stories from their lives in and outside of science. Stay tuned!

Make sure to hit the subscribe button to get al...

Melanie Bieli is a special guest in more than one way. She’s the first junior scientist to appear on Deep Convection, having just finished her Ph.D. a year ago; but more importantly, she’s the co-creator and creative director of the podcast. So she has been part of all the previous episodes, silently — but on this episode you can actually hear her voice.

Melanie was born and raised in Switzerland. She did her MS degree at ETH Zurich, in Atmospheric Science, and then spent a couple of years working in the reinsurance industry, at Swiss...

For Ed Sarachik, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, science and art have always been complementary but equally important ingredients to an intellectually fulfilling life. When he was a physics major at Queens College in New York City, his art teacher gave him an assignment that would become a formative art experience: Spending hours at the Frick Collection looking at a Vermeer, Ed started to truly see the painting, the play of light and vividness of the scene that a postcard of the original just can’t capture. He was hooked, and visits to art museums remained an...

Amy Clement, professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, loves the ocean. We are mentioning this because her research may seem to suggest otherwise: Amy has proposed bold and controversial ideas about how the role of the ocean in controlling several modes of variability of the climate system may be smaller than most climate scientists had believed.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon relies heavily on the coupling of the atmosphere to the ocean? The sea surface temperature patterns of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) are the result of...

Faye McNeill studies aerosols, small liquid or solid particles floating in the atmosphere. Each cubic centimeter of air contains hundreds or thousands of these particles – some of them are natural (e.g., dust from dry regions or salt from the ocean) and others are released into the air by human activity, e.g., by cars or factories that burn fossil fuels.

Faye, a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University, studies how aerosols form and evolve, how they influence climate, and how they affect human health. Over the last few months, the coronavirus pandemic has moved th...

This second part of the interview with Mark Cane picks up where Part I left off – at MIT, in the middle of Mark’s PhD. A major focus of the interview is the discovery that made Mark’s career, when he and his student at the time, Steve Zebiak, developed the first dynamical model that could both simulate and predict El Niño events; and then how they ventured to
make an actual real-time prediction, of the 1985-86 event, and then publicized it. That was a bold and risky move, but it paid off.

“The fact...

Mark Cane is the center of the “family portrait” of climate scientists that are featured in this first season of Deep Convection. In recognition of his special role, we are going to cover Mark’s life in two episodes – this is Part I.

Mark Cane is most famous for his seminal work on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation phenomenon, which will be one of the main topics of Part II. But this conversation starts at the beginning, with Mark’s origins in Brooklyn during the age of the Dodgers, before the club moved to Los Angeles in 1...

Richard Seager is a climate scientist at Columbia University and has been an Englishman in New York for more than 30 years. In this conversation, he talks about what will happen to the tropical Pacific under global warming (and why the climate models are wrong about that), about his passion for jazz and how it once led him to bike home at 1 am in the morning from Manchester to Liverpool after seeing the Sun Ra Arkestra, about the Green New Deal, the power of imagination, and combining science and art.

Richard is a...

Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, “Gun Island”, takes its readers on an adventurous journey from the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans to raging wildfires in Los Angeles and to a Venice that is inexorably sinking into the sea.

Amitav is one of the most accomplished writers in either India or the US, the two countries in which he lives. In 2018, he became the first English-language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor. Amitav is known for novels such as Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy, which ch...

This is a bonus episode, thrown together quickly, as the coronavirus pandemic is evolving at such a rapid pace that predicting what it will look like in the weeks ahead is incredibly difficult. The guest is Jeff Shaman, one of the world’s experts in modeling the spread of infectious diseases. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, but these days he is spending his time less on his research than on communicating with public officials and sharing his expertise with the White House and the...

Why should we trust science? Historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pondered this question for years, and here she talks about the surprising answer she has come up with (hint: it’s not because of the scientific method). Naomi, a geologist by training, also talks about her time working for a mining company in Australia, the skepticism she faced as a woman, and how she later fell in love with the history of science.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading voices on t...

Michela Biasutti studies rainfall in the tropics – when and where it rains, and why. She does this at Columbia University in New York, where she settled down after her scientific curiosity had first led her to move from her native Italy to Seattle.

Michela is one of many foreign-born scientists who have managed to build successful careers in the United States and have made the country their home. Adjusting to all the practical aspects of daily life in the United States can be challenging, and with family and loved ones far away, finding and building a ne...