Graduate research, translated through conversation.
GradCast is a campus research interview show built around Western University graduate students and their work. Recent conversations move from care and learner English to carbon flux, groundwater contamination, chickadee vocalizations, butterflies, and space communication.
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GradCast is a Western University graduate research show that treats academic work as conversation rather than announcement. It has the feel of a campus radio room with notebooks open. Recent episodes move across theory and criticism, sustainability advocacy, digital humanities, environmental engineering, education research, psychology, conservation biology, carbon modeling, and satellite communication. The range is wide, but the pattern is steady. Guests are asked what they study, how their field works, and why the research matters beyond the dissertation or thesis. That gives the show a practical editorial shape: first make the unfamiliar subject legible, then follow it toward consequences. A conversation about care becomes a discussion of labor, universities, and social life. A sustainability episode moves through SOGS committee work, student turnover, community connections, and campus advocacy. Environmental research brings in landfills, groundwater contamination, municipal policy, plastic waste, and habits of consumption. Language research turns derivatives, learner English, word-family lists, and invented words into a lively question about vocabulary development. Bird communication becomes a path into chickadee species, passive recorders, audio files, and phone-based identification tools. Butterfly research opens questions about bog copper habitat, cranberries, island populations, movement, genetic diversity, and conservation practice. The science episodes are not afraid of method. Flux towers, carbon budgets, canopy coverage, peak productivity days, microsatellites, and CubeSat subsystems all appear in the recent window. The show’s strength is that these terms usually arrive with follow-up questions attached. Hosts and co-hosts often act as translators from research language into ordinary curiosity, asking the question that lets a guest slow down and define the machinery. The result is not a polished lecture series. It is closer to a working tour through graduate study, with enough campus texture to remind the listener that these projects are happening inside departments, committees, labs, and student collaborations. GradCast also carries recurring institutional threads, including Radio Western, SOGS, the Thinking with the Earth miniseries, and the Inspiring Minds partnership. Its tone is friendly and direct. The conversations can be technical, but they are rarely sealed off from everyday examples. GradCast gives listeners a rotating map of early-stage and emerging scholarship, one student project at a time.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes academic subjects made conversational, especially when the path runs from technical method to real-world stakes. It is a good fit for curiosity that crosses departments rather than staying inside one field.
What sets it apart: GradCast stands out by foregrounding graduate students’ own explanations of their research across a very wide campus range. The show keeps the institutional texture visible, from SOGS advocacy to Radio Western and interdisciplinary student projects.
GradCast is the official podcast of the Society of Graduate Students at Western University. We highlight the research our university/‘s graduate students. From History to Histology, we show you the cutting edge research of one of Canada/‘s top research universities.
From bog copper butterflies to oxidized proteins, your next research rabbit hole could be surprisingly small.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful, loosely shaped discussion of care, labor, and graduate life inside the university.
Gradcast uses the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism as a way into a broader conversation about care as work, study, and institutional experience.
A grounded conversation about sustaining campus sustainability work when graduate committees keep changing.
GradCast's Thinking with the Earth series focuses on the everyday work of campus sustainability, where ideals meet limited time, shifting membership, and the practical demands of student organizing.
A clear, grounded look at how towers, satellites, and peak productivity days help researchers read carbon fluxes across landscapes.
GradCast turns carbon into a question of measurement in its conversation with Samantha Hopkins, whose work uses Python and R to study carbon fluxes from flux tower networks and think through how those readings might inform large-scale land models of carbon budgets.
A clear, accessible look at how English learners build and test word families.
GradCast turns derivatives into a practical way into a focused education study, using the idea of a word-making factory without letting the metaphor take over.
A clear look at how chickadee calls become evidence about species sharing the same terrain.
GradCast frames chickadee vocalizations as a question about coexistence: do two West Coast species change how they sound when they share territory versus when they live apart?
Art historian Tamar Avishai interviews critics, curators, and writers about single paintings and ideas.
Sound art from places, recordings, and memory.
A graduate student explains how nonsense suppressor tRNAs could treat Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy by overriding premature stop codons.
GradCast episode 548 features Mara Schneider and Mark Imbrosio speaking with Kaylee Coutillo, a PhD student in Western’s Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism.
GradCast’s third Thinking with the Earth episode centers on Javier Bonsi, a Western PhD student in Hispanic Studies and SOGS sustainability coordinator, who describes moving from a desert city in northern Mexico to campus sustainability work.
PhD student Dharmaraj Dhakal discusses his research on groundwater contamination from landfill leachate using geophysical methods.
GradCast episode 548 pairs Samantha Hopkins’ carbon-flux PhD with her flag-football career at Western University.
GradCast host Mara Schneider and co-host Kelly Wong interview Western University education master's student Yuhan Zhao about how English-as-a-second-language learners use derivatives such as happiness, unhappy, and happily.
GradCast episode 544 features Anthony Cruz and Raffaella Plattkin talking with Alexander Muth, an MSc psychology student at Western University, about chickadee "accents." Muth says he compares two West Coast chickadee species in British Columbia, Oregon, Washington State, and California by measuring duration, frequency, modulation, and note spacing in Raven Pro.
GradCast hosts Krishma and Garth Casborne interview master's student Madison Robinson about bog copper butterflies found on rocky islands near cranberry habitats.
GradCast hosts Mark Ambrosio and Victor Lau interview Purvaja Karthikeyan, a second-year electrical and computer engineering PhD student developing photonic integrated circuits for optical satellite communication.
GradCast interviews Jake Degel, a Lund University bioinformatician completing a 40-week master's thesis at Western University on virus mutation evolution and fitness landscapes.
GradCast episode 540 features Varsha Vasudevan, a third-year Western University PhD candidate who has served as a Career Education peer advisor since 2018.
GradCast host Maris Schneider and co-host Mark Ambrosio interview Jessica Holmes, a PhD candidate in speech and language sciences at Western University.
GradCast interviews Saoirse Roundtree about MA research on cranial modification in ancient Peru and PhD research on Permian atmospheric oxygen.
GradCast host Garth Casborne and co-host Mark Ambrosio interview Caitlin Gagnon, a Western University PhD candidate studying Émile Zola’s two lesser-known comedies from 1874 and 1878.
GradCast host Bruno Mesquita and co-host Garth Casborne interview Jessica Lammert, a fifth-year PhD student in Western University’s Cognitive Developmental and Brain Sciences program, about how children process and retell stories.
GradCast hosts Millen and Guljeet interview biomedical engineering researcher Emily Potts about sex-specific concussion biomechanics and mild traumatic brain injuries.
GradCast hosts Anthony Cruz and Bruno Mesquita interview Shanaz Sahid Ali, a PhD student in Nursing and former nurse-midwife with more than 15 years of experience, about midwives’ mental health support during pregnancy, birth, and afterbirth.
GradCast hosts Mark Ambrosio and Ryan Baxter interview Ran Jiang, a Western University PhD candidate researching accessible musical instruments made with digital technologies by Chinese grade-seven and grade-eight students.
GradCast host Anthony Cruz and co-host Mellon Maumann interview Western University PhD student Evelyn McKay-Barr about protein oxidation, folding, and mass spectrometry.
GradCast hosts Kelly Wong and Marc Ambrosio interview Marina G.
An interview with MFA student Natasha Bodwin about her research merging traditional portrait techniques with digital identity.
A master's student explains how nonsense suppressor tRNAs could treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy by allowing ribosomes to read through premature stop codons.