'Behind the Blue': Everything is Science

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(SINGING) On, on, U of K. We are right for the fight today. Hold that ball and hit that line. Every Wildcat star will shine. We'll fight, fight, fight.

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SPEAKER: From the campus of the University of Kentucky, you're listening to Behind the Blue.

KODY KISER: Science is all around us-- pushing, pulling, exerting opposing forces that keep the universe in balance. The University of Kentucky and featured guest speakers from around the region are gathering once again to take a week-long look at practical science in casual settings during this year's Everything is Science Festival, Opposites Attract.

Everything is Science, Opposites Attract is a week of paired presentations, lectures, and demonstrations that take a closer look at the yin and yang of science. Taking place March 4 through 8 at participating local restaurants and bars, the festival aims to demonstrate how science is happening all around us and not just in research labs.

I'm Kody Kiser with UK PR and Marketing, and I'm joined by UK PR's Allison Perry. On this episode of Behind the Blue, Vincent Venditto, an assistant professor in the UK College of Pharmacy, and second-year pharmacy student Jared [INAUDIBLE] talk about the development of the festival, what it means to bring these discussions into such casual settings, and how attendees can get a no-pressure introduction to the everyday science that is happening all around them.

We are joined today on the podcast by two guests, Vincent Venditto, who is assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Jared [INAUDIBLE], who is a second year graduate student in the College of Pharmacy. And we are talking today about Everything is Science. So thank you both for being with us. We appreciate that.

VINCENT VENDITTO: Sure. Thanks for having us.

KODY KISER: So first things first, Vincent, talk a little bit about how you ended up here at the University of Kentucky. What does that path look like for you? How'd you end up here with us?

VINCENT VENDITTO: Sure. It's a bit of a circuitous path, I guess. I grew up in Philadelphia, went to undergrad at Gettysburg College, and then went to do a PhD in chemistry at Texas A&M University. And after that, I realized that I wanted to gain a little bit more biological experience, so I went to do a postdoc developing HIV vaccines at University of California in San Francisco.

And then as I was looking for jobs, the position opened at UK in the College of Pharmacy, and so I applied for it. I love the interaction I had when I interviewed, and so this is where I ended up. So I've been here now since 2015, and it really has become home.

KODY KISER: And what's kind of your specialty areas that you work on here?

VINCENT VENDITTO: Sure, yeah. So at University of California, I was working on HIV vaccines and using liposome technology to modulate immune responses to induce robust immunity towards the virus. And when I moved here, I realized the strengths of the university and the interactions I could have if I worked in other areas, other than HIV vaccines, like in cardiovascular disease and neuroscience.

So I'm using all of the same technology that I was developing during my postdoc, but now applying it to cardiovascular disease to try and modulate immune responses in mice, and also because we have the clinical center here, I'm able to get clinical samples and actually have everything driven by the observations that we making in human subjects.

KODY KISER: Well, I was going to ask you about that, actually. Is that different being here at a land-grant research institute that has a medical center or pharmacy school, all of those types of things that are in a lot of specialized areas, right at your fingertips? Does that help?

VINCENT VENDITTO: Absolutely. Absolutely. And having everything on campus within walking distance is fantastic. Anytime I need an instrument or I want to do something that we don't necessarily have in pharmacy, I can very easily contact somebody across campus and get access to that instrument. And because I have a broad background in both chemistry, and vaccine design, and liposome, drug delivery, there's a lot of instrumentation that I don't necessarily have myself, but they do have in engineering or they do have in some of these other colleges where I'm able to interact and engage with across campus.

KODY KISER: So Jared, you're second year in pharmacy school. Did you do your undergraduate work here, or where did you come to the university from?

JARED: So, no, I didn't I actually did my bachelor's degree, just a basic biology bachelor's degree, at Arkansas State University. It's maybe a mid-sized school in northeastern Arkansas where I'm from. And so pretty much all of my experience prior to coming here was in plant biotechnology. Most of my research was geared towards some sort of endpoint that was supportive of the agricultural industry, working on transgenic plants, things like that.

And so I knew one of the professors here, Dr. Joe Chappell, just from going to research conferences. He was good friends with my mentor in undergrad. And I actually incorporated some suggestions from him in my final undergraduate project. And so just from there, we were friends and he suggested thinking about applying to graduate school, and that the program here would be really good, just based on the techniques that I knew and my interest in science.

And so I applied to the program. The interview was what really sold me on it. I was just kind of blown away, and as soon as I got the offer, I accepted it.

KODY KISER: And we were talking before we started recording. You mentioned that traditional-- like the idea of a pharmacist working in a pharmacy somewhere, that's not necessarily where your passion is. Your passion is more in a different kind of route?

JARED: Yeah, absolutely not. While I do think that's a great route to go, they're absolutely necessary, my interest mostly is research on the front end of things, doing some of the basic biologic biology and just some of the basic research that eventually amounts into an approved drug or some sort of new therapy.

ALLISON PERRY: Do you get to work with Dr. Chappell now?

JARED: I don't, actually. That was the sad thing was that I kind of came in really wanting to work with him and everything, and it just didn't quite work out well. But thankfully, we had a lot of professors that I was open to working with, so I kind of just chose from there.

KODY KISER: So I guess let's get into, on a broad view of it, Everything is Science. What is this, in a nutshell?

VINCENT VENDITTO: Yeah, so Everything is Science is a festival. It's a citywide festival that brings professionals, really, because science is in everything that we do. And it brings those professionals to talk about how science applies to their field of study or their profession. And all of the events are held in restaurants and bars around town.

And so it's a way to expose the community-- the public, the college community, and also the larger Lexington community-- to the science that's around them.

KODY KISER: So when do you say expose or introduce the community at large to science around them, what exactly do we mean by that? What types of things do we talk about at these events?

VINCENT VENDITTO: Sure. So this is the second year that we're doing this. Last year, we had 10 events over three days with 54 speakers. And the speakers ranged from somebody from Town Branch Distilling, the master distiller, talking about how to make bourbon. Seth Diebold talked about the winemaking and the different classes that they teach in the ag department here.

We also had speakers talk about HIV and the HIV epidemic that's still happening, and that's happening around us in Kentucky and Indiana. I spoke about the development of vaccines and the technology behind that. So last year's events were much more focused on specific, mostly health-related topics. We had a few sessions that were really actually quite interesting and I think brought together a diverse audience.

The one session, called The Science of Space, had one of our graduate students from the College of Pharmacy talk about sending plants into space and looking at the genes that are affected once the seeds and the plants are in space. So that's the space above us-- the space that we normally think of. And then we had somebody from the College of Design talk about the space around us with architectural design, and how we can re-envision space around us.

And then a professor from the College of Pharmacy talked about microbes in the soil in the space below us, and how we can extract drugs from those organisms. And so that session really got us interested in bringing together some diverse speakers, so this year is much more focused not on a specific topic, but a broad topic area.

So the sessions this year are dead and alive. So one session on dead, one session on live. So if you think about in the dead session-- that's the session that I'm actually chairing-- so I met somebody, Steve Coombs, who talks about the science of country ham, and how the different flavors come from the curing process, and the age of curing, and what actually is happening scientifically in ham when it's cured.

And that actually pays very nicely with bourbon. And so I'm having one of the people from Michter's bourbon to come down and talk about the science of distilling and bourbon. And so it's really a pairing. It's labeled as dead, but it's bourbon and ham, and so loosely fit into the dead, maybe.

And then I'm looking for another speaker right now that's hopefully talk about forensic science, or mortuary science, or something that's a little bit more what we think of actually as dead. And by doing this, it brings together a diverse audience, diverse speakers, diverse audience that will hopefully encourage questions, interaction, potential collaborations moving forward, and help invigorate the community and the campus.

KODY KISER: It does make me think. In terms of the name, Everything is Science, it seems a little direct, or maybe even kind of simple maybe. There's not a lot to the name. But it really does open this door to a larger kind of world and a larger kind of view or examination of things.

JARED: I was really interested in it just because I've always been sort of interested in science outreach and educating the general public. I come from the backwoods of Arkansas, where I remember in high school, most of my classmates were going on to some sort of technical job, some sort of vocational job, which absolutely have their place.

But there was not really as much of an appreciation for science. There was actually a large amount of skepticism about science in general. And so really what got me interested in all of it was that, especially with having these diverse topics now, we can really pull in, or maybe people that are already at a brewery, or would be there anyway, or just come for our event, that we can really bring them in and entertain them.

So sort of entertain them, but also educate them at the same time. So some of the bigger issues that people don't really understand, like you see non-GMO labels on all sorts of products if you go to Whole Foods or even in Walmart-- anywhere you go now. And so my basis in agricultural research, I know that it makes no sense why there would be non-GMO versus GMO.

There's really no difference, and it's probably actually in your best interest to go with products made from GMO crops. But at the same time, the general public doesn't have access to that information. They only really see what journalists propagate from scientific reports that they've read. And you can trust me when I say, I can imagine it would be really difficult as a journalist trying to read journal articles and everything.

It's tough enough for me as a graduate student, that I do it all the time. But I can only imagine, and then trying to sort of translate all the scientific jargon and technical language to something that makes sense to your everyday person, that's really tough. And that's sort of the problem that we're trying to tackle with this, as well as just celebrating the fact that science is in everything that we do, whether you know it or not.

And if nothing else, if our guests take away just that oh, I learned a little bit about how bourbon is made, or how ham is cured, or even something that they might not have thought of before. Like last year, we had an event that covered health disparities and the LGBTQ community. And so that's something that you don't ever think about unless you have a large group of friends that happen to be in that community, or you're around that community in some way.

So there would be no way for a lot of people to know about that. But at the same time, it's a big issue of today.

ALLISON PERRY: You hit on one thing I was going to ask, which is that science is really the driver behind just about everything in life, which I think people don't really think about. And I didn't know if you wanted to add anything to it. We kind of take for granted that we all get in our car and drive to work in the morning, but we don't think about how that came to be, and the science behind how we just take this for granted now.

VINCENT VENDITTO: Right. And that was kind of the driving force behind this year, and having diverse speakers. And we set this year up so that we had coordinators for each session from around campus, so we weren't all-- the organizing committee, Jared, myself, Dr. [INAUDIBLE]-- having the three of us, and some others from the College of Pharmacy, planning everything because our network is relatively small.

Certainly, we have a network, but our networks overlap somewhat. And by having people outside of that, we can actually bring in additional thoughts, additional concepts. And so I can't speak exactly on all of the speakers that we're having this year, because they're being organized by some of the other speakers. But as we were planning this, we thought about some of the topics.

I said dead and alive. Another one is sticky, bouncy. And so that's a very broad topic. But when you think about sticky, that is being organized by John Pham, who's in the College of Engineering. And he works with materials that are sticky. He also works with materials that are bouncy. He could talk about the material properties that lead to that.

But with sticky, you can also think about sticky marketing. So you can have what makes marketing sticky? There is a science behind making marketing sticky and what actually leads people to follow specific marketing or not follow other marketing. So that's all based in science. And it is really all around us. Everything you see around us it is science, even though we might not actually think about it that way.

ALLISON PERRY: Why do you think it's so important for your average person on the street to be thinking about that, to be thinking about the science behind what they do every day?

JARED: I think in general, education, just gaining as much knowledge as you can, is good for anybody's mind in general. But at the same time, when you learned things and you take on new things like that, it kind of forces you to perhaps step out of your comfort zone, but certainly to see things from a different perspective than you might have before.

And all that can do is really help you in the long run because what's so bad about seeing things from another perspective? What's so bad about enhancing your world view? That sort of thing. And so whether or not any sort of opportunity arises or you see any real tangible gain from it, I think that just coming away with new knowledge, I know in my personal opinion, is in and of itself a great thing, would make me want to attend.

VINCENT VENDITTO: I would also say that we're living now in the era of fake news. And so we need to be intelligent about the media that we're consuming and what's around us. And so if we can make an impact through the Everything is Science Festival by educating the public-- maybe we're not going to teach them about all of the fake news that they're reading, but hopefully we can touch on some areas and actually spark some interest for them to continue pursuing on their own.

KODY KISER: I did want to ask about the people who attended the last year, and obviously, they took away things from this that maybe they hadn't considered before. They took away maybe changes in perception of the things around them. In planning for this year, how did some of that play into-- like that feedback that maybe you got, how did that play into, this is what really benefited everyone last year, or these are some things that maybe we wanted to consider this year based on things that people commented on?

JARED: I think that was really the largest driver in our change of the whole design of the festival this year. We went with this whole opposites attract theme throughout the entire festival, so you have dead versus alive, sticky versus bouncy, nature versus nurture. We've got all these opposing ideas. And so our idea in that is that you're not going to go to the dead session and learn about, OK, I don't know, maybe you listen to a mortician or learn about dead people.

It's not going to be very literally connected to it. So we think with that loose connection, not only will it spark interest in people, but maybe they'll see something that they weren't expecting or learn about something that they weren't expecting. And so that was really sort of what we're trying to get at. And exposing people did totally different things that they wouldn't have thought about in their everyday life, and the whole format of it in that we have slideless talks, so the speakers need to really be able to tell a good story.

I think that helps even more because just from being a student for as long as I have, that really, really helps when you can be engaged with somebody. It's more conversational. It's not just like a lecture sort of thing.

VINCENT VENDITTO: Yeah. I think two of the sessions last year that were some of the best-attended was the LGBTQ health disparity session and the cancer session. But what we noticed at both of those sessions-- there were 35 to 50 people at each of those sessions, and in the cancer session, there were a lot of cancer researchers around.

And so that was great to encourage those collaborations and there was technology-- Brad Barron spoke about his technology of single-cell isolations, which was really interesting. And I think that there were people in that set, audience members that had not met Brad before, had not known of his technology. So it forced collaborations, or encouraged collaborations, by the audience.

But because everybody was already a cancer researcher there, or mostly, we thought is there a way where we can actually infuse cancer into some of these other sessions and actually get people to think about cancer when they wouldn't normally be thinking about the science behind cancer? And the same thing with the LGBTQ health disparities. It was a lot of LGBTQ-identifying individuals and allies, and so it was an excellent session.

We had such great speakers, but they're speaking to people that are already agreeing with the ideas and what they were speaking about. And exposing people to LGBTQ health disparities outside of an LGBTQ audience and allies-- so we're hoping that this year we can harness the success that we had last year and really try and bring diverse audiences together more effectively.

ALLISON PERRY: I was going to ask, for this year's festival, how did you go about searching for your speakers?

VINCENT VENDITTO: Yeah, so we actually, as the organizing committee, identified paired words that we could identify a number of speakers that would fit into those words broadly, or into those common themes. So we have-- we said this a number of times-- dead and alive, sticky, bouncy, big, small, nature, nurture, and pleasure, pain.

And so each of those words is one of the sessions. And you can think about a lot of different speakers going into the dead session, or into nature and nurture. So we tried to come up with paired words that were flexible. And then we have coordinators from across campus, so we have 10 coordinators that are then charged with identifying speakers with broad backgrounds.

So we met with the coordinators to encourage them to think broadly about these words and kind of bend their minds, I guess, about how they consider sticky or how they consider bouncy, and not just focus in on material science, but think about really a diversity of topics.

KODY KISER: This is going to be a painfully obvious question, but there may be more to it than just the surface of it. You could bring in someone to campus to discuss the distillation process, or to discuss HIV research, or cancer research. So why a bar, or a restaurant, or an ice cream shop, apart from the social aspect of it, I suppose? And talk about that, but also how did those places embrace this concept?

JARED: So my specific role is for basically coordinating the venues. I did that last year. I've had some experience with event planning and everything. And where I really enjoy event planning is sort of the behind-the-scenes thing. And so I think my biggest thing is not only the social aspect of all those places-- that's great.

But it's also sort of a place where people let their guard down, so to speak. It's not a place where you go in expecting to have a long science lecture on cancer biology or something like that. And that's not what our intention is. But since all the guests that are there in that sort of place where their guard is down, they're open to hearing new things, we're not telling them we're trying to help them learn anything.

If they do learn anything, we're mostly just there to be seen as sort of entertainment. And we sneak in the educational component in there, and they're so entertained that maybe something piques their interest and perhaps that leads to like several Google searches that you learn a lot about a topic that you didn't really have an idea about.

So really that's it, that there's a certain level of vulnerability that people open their minds up when they're in that sort of environment, whether it be an ice cream shop, or a brewery, or what have you, that we may not be able to get if we were at, say, a TEDx conference, or in a science classroom, or something like that where people are really expecting to come away with something, to learn something, that sort of thing.

KODY KISER: Other than direct feedback, how do you measure the success of this? You don't know what people necessarily take from it and what they go home and research more on their own. So how do you glean that?

VINCENT VENDITTO: That's a very good question.

JARED: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

VINCENT VENDITTO: That's something we're trying to address better this year. At the 10 events last year, we had over 355 people at all the events combined, which just the numbers alone I think are a success because we're bringing people out into these environments. And all of the sessions are completely free, so hopefully that encourages more people to come out.

And so that's one metric, is that we have 350 people attending. And hopefully those numbers go up this year. It's difficult to actually glean any additional information, other than those numbers. However, this year, we're going to have comment cards to try and-- was this a good event? Would you encourage your friends to attend this event? Do you have any comments? And hopefully, some of that will help us get additional information, too.

JARED: Other than that, it's just like I had people I didn't know before that I think I MCed maybe three or four venues, or three or four events, last year. So I had pharmacy students that I didn't know prior to that, some graduate students that I wasn't really familiar with, that seem like they kind of came out of the woodwork. And that was like, that's a really cool idea. I hope you guys keep doing this and everything for the next year.

So yeah, other than the numbers, it's kind of just that, at the end of the day, makes it all worth it for me in that somebody just thinks it's a cool idea, or thinks it's something worth doing, that they could see how somebody who might not have access to that information prior to the event really came away with something.

VINCENT VENDITTO: So the other thing that I would add is there's a lot of anecdotal evidence, like Jared's bringing up, of oh, this was a great event. But we had people reach out to us that said they wanted to be involved in planning this year. We had some speakers reach out to us that said they wanted to speak at this year's events.

We actually have a venue this year-- Creaux, I think is how you pronounce it-- that they're normally closed on Mondays, but they're opening to hold the event. So I think that there's still anecdotal, but there's a lot of encouraging signs that what we're doing is actually having an impact.

ALLISON PERRY: I was going to ask a little bit more about what are the venues kind of general reactions to being willing to collaborate with you on this? And can you go ahead mention some of the places that--

JARED: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just off the top of my head, I know Creaux is a venue. We've got Crank & Boom in there, Pivot. We're having an event at West Sixth, but we're also having an event at the West Sixth Greenroom downtown. We're having another event at Parlay Social. There's another event at Blue Stallion, Rock House Brewing. I know I'm probably missing a few there.

There are a few more that we'll certainly have added on to that. But in general, they're very, very excited. Most of the time I'm talking to some sort of events manager, or like just the manager in general. And in general, people are very, very supportive of this. And they're really excited. They're very helpful most of the time and want to know what they can do to help, how they can help in advertising, that sort of thing, which is really nice.

Because especially when you don't have any sort of name recognition-- in the past, I've helped plan a TEDx conference. And if you think things are easy to get done normally, bring up the name TED, and things just kind of fall from the sky, it seems like. When you don't have that name recognition, you're really going off, how good is this idea? How much impact will this festival really have?

And from a venue manager's perspective, how much will my customers appreciate this? Will this make them want to continue to come back, not only to this event, but our brewery? Because it's sort of unspoken endorsement when they let us come in. And so we want to be very cognizant of that and do the best job that we can.

And so that's why I was really happy that we have several of our venues from last year that wanted to continue to do it this year. And so for me, that's sort of my own metric of, OK, we're not only doing right by our guests and we're happy with our numbers, we're happy with how the festival went, but we're doing right by the people who are willing to open up and let us host. And since it's a totally free event, we're trying to make it as cost-neutral as possible.

We don't want to take donations if we don't have to, so that's another big thing, too. We're having events on Thursdays and Fridays, especially, and some of them last until 9:00 PM. So those are really high volume nights. A lot of the time, this could be a larger risk for some venues than others. And so that sort of vote of confidence that they're OK with us coming in on a Friday night and staying until 9:00 PM, that really says a lot about the power of what we're doing and the impact that we're making, I think.

ALLISON PERRY: To make it clear-- you've already kind of mentioned it, but it's not just like UK professors doing these talks, too. It's people out in the community. Do you want to talk a little bit about who's representing businesses and stuff from Lexington this year?

VINCENT VENDITTO: Sure. Yeah. This might be a tough answer for this year--

JARED: Yeah, that's a lot.

VINCENT VENDITTO: --because we don't have all the speakers lined up yet. But for my talk, Steve Coombs is an author and he writes about cured ham. He's from Louisville. Michters is located in Louisville, so we actually have reached across the state. I'm trying to think of the other--

JARED: Yeah. I can speak on some people from industry. Like last year, we had Derek DeFranco, the owner of Mirror Twin Brewing, come and give a talk. I was really happy about that. We had a professor from EKU and WKU. We're really trying to tap into these other universities because there are a large amount of people and programs that maybe we're not aware of.

Like Morehead State University-- they have a large women's studies program. They have a lot of professors researching that sort of thing. So we had Bernadette Barton come and speak last year at our LGBTQ health disparities panel. And so not even just as a professor who studies that sort of thing, studies gender studies, and knows about the theoretical dilemma behind all of that, but also as somebody who grew up in rural Kentucky and has experienced a lot of those things herself. It was really, really nice to see that.

So we have definitely branched out more. We're trying to branch out even more. And so I think another person we have this year is Bill Mack from Lexington 18, who's going to speak in our big session about big storms, big weather, and sort of change our idea on that sort of thing.

KODY KISER: From a university perspective, you're involved in this as a graduate student. Is there a lot of student involvement? And across campus, how is that kind of factoring in, that you're getting volunteers from different disciplines?

JARED: Yeah, so last year, I noticed that a large proportion of most of our audiences were actually students. Many of them were students from the College of Pharmacy, but also, they tell their friends who are in different programs and things like that. So we had just a large proportion of young professional students, where they're graduate students who are in the College of Medicine, Public Health, or even outside of that, some of the social sciences colleges.

And then we've actually brought on-- last year I think we definitely had more students than faculty or staff members on the organizing committee. I believe it's the same this year. I think we have five or six students, including myself, and then Vince and Sophie. So student involvement I think is something we've tried to keep at the forefront of it because we know that that will be a large audience of ours.

KODY KISER: So if people want to learn more about the Everything is Science Festival, including a list of topics and venues that are happening, how they can attend, where can they go to find that information out?

VINCENT VENDITTO: The website is pharmacy.uky.edu/eis. And we're also on Twitter @eis_lex, Facebook @eislex, Instagram eis_lex.

KODY KISER: You have all of the social media outlets. You've got a good covering of all of that.

JARED: Everybody can go to that website to find out pretty much all the information that will be covered in the festival, all the venues. But we'll also be advertising. We've advertised posters all around town that we can use just to try to get out, not only through social media, but through word of mouth in general. We find that that's a really good way to get the word out.

KODY KISER: And what are the dates, exactly, on when these events-- the beginning and end dates for this?

VINCENT VENDITTO: So the festival is March 4 to the 8th. That's a Monday to Friday. There's two events per night, and the events are 5:30 to 7:00 and then 7:30 to 9:00. And each event will be at a different location.

KODY KISER: So for students on campus, undergraduate or graduate, who are not necessarily in a particular science discipline, what are some events that you think they might find interesting coming to that they would be able to get that information in a easily-digestible kind of format that they would find value in?

JARED: So I know definitely from my perspective, some of them would absolutely pique my interest, like dead versus alive, and how are you going to incorporate science into that sort of thing? That would pique my interest a little bit more than something like nature versus nurture, which sounds very science-y to me. But what I would say is that our effort in this is to try to do that in every session.

With that being said, it's a learning process that this idea wasn't just something that we've had in the works for a long time and that we've had a lot of time to sort of flesh out all our ideas and everything, that we're still working on it. But we want to, in addition to bringing in diverse topic areas into each of the talks, stay sort of true to our roots in that we do have some of the hard science that public are not going to have access to, or even students in other disciplines are not going to have access to.

Because even as a student, a lot of the time, it can be really difficult to learn about how to read this journal article, and how to glean practical knowledge that you can use to then make decisions on a day-to-day basis from it.

VINCENT VENDITTO: So the sessions are set up so that there's no PowerPoint presentations. Everything will be presented with demonstrations and analogies. So really, all of the content should be accessible to everybody that attends. And because of the diversity of the speakers, we're designing it so that the audience of a diverse background can really access any of the talks.

And for example, one of the talks in the big session, or the three talks in the big session, Bill Mack is going to talk about meteorology and weather patterns. And certainly there's science behind that, but he speaks to people every day right on the news when he does his weather report. So he needs to be accessible. And then the other two speakers in that session is Mark Pitts-- he does astronomy research at EKU, and then somebody in College of Arts and Science here, and the name escapes me, but they talk about astronomy and poetry.

And so those two talks are actually going to be linked, to where they talk about the science of astronomy and then also the astronomy that's in poetry and writing, and how these two things are linked. So it really will be accessible to a broad audience at all levels of education.

KODY KISER: What was it about the pharmacy program here that appealed to you as an incoming student? What made you want to come to the University of Kentucky to study this here?

JARED: Unlike many other students, I had a good idea of where I wanted to go in my career before even applying to the program. Whether or not I knew I wanted to work in the pharmaceutical industry specifically, I knew I wanted to work in some sort of industry setting. And I wasn't interested in going back to a university and teaching and doing research.

I'm not particularly interested in working for the government, whether by doing research or by sort of influencing policy in one way or another. I knew that I wanted to work in some industry setting. And so they made it very clear up front that if that's something you wanted to do, there's a large proportion of students that go to industry from that program.

And I think another large part of it was just the resources. Whether it's in the pharmaceutical industry or in a college of pharmacy, the resources are great. And not only that, it wasn't just the resources there, it was the fact that I can walk across a bridge and talk to professors in the College of Medicine, or Dentistry, or Nursing, or Public Health, or what have you and form collaborations that are going to help that I may not have had access to in other programs or at other universities.

So really, the large focus they placed on collaborating and sort of doing translational science, not just sticking to one specific area, was really what drew me in.

KODY KISER: Is there anything that we didn't ask over the last half hour or 45 minutes that we've been talking that you feel is important to get out there, or anything that we didn't touch on that you wanted to mention?

VINCENT VENDITTO: All I would say is I want to really reiterate that it's a completely free festival. We're really targeted towards broad audience, all scientific backgrounds. Even though the events are largely held in bars and restaurants, which are normally 21 and over, each of the venues have opened it up to open their venues up to allow under 21 to attend so that we can really access a broader audience.

So yeah, hopefully we see everybody out there.

JARED: Yeah, and just to add on to that, at its core, this festival is really about exposing people to new ideas that they wouldn't have had the opportunity to, or maybe wouldn't have even wanted to beforehand, and doing that in a setting that is not trying to teach you anything or anything like that. Yeah, perhaps you'll learn about something. But at the end of the day, we hope more that you'll be entertained and enjoy yourself during each of the sessions than anything else.

KODY KISER: Well, OK. The Everything is Science Festival is March 4 through the 8th, and for more information, hit me with that website one more time?

VINCENT VENDITTO: It's pharmacy.uky.edu/eis.

KODY KISER: Excellent. Vincent Venditto and Jared [INAUDIBLE], thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it. And good luck with the festival. And I hope you have a huge amount of attendance that shows up at it, and everybody has a rich experience with it.

JARED: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

VINCENT VENDITTO: Thank you. Thank you.

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SPEAKER: Thank you for joining us on this edition of Behind the Blue. For more information about this episode, or any other episode, visit us online at uky.edu/behindtheblue. You can send questions or comments via email to behindtheblue@uky.edu, or tweet your questions using #BehindTheBlue. Behind the Blue is a joint production of university of Kentucky Public Relations and Marketing and UK Health Care.