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About Melek Firat Altay
Melek Firat Altay is a trained musician and neurobiologist, currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Her research focuses on unravelling the patho-mechanisms underpinning neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders, with a particular interest in modulating immune responses to alleviate Alzheimer's disease pathology. Passionate about science communication, she is the City Coordinator for Pint of Science Festival at Stanford/Palo Alto. Beyond the lab, she hosts podcasts at the New Books Network, featuring newly published books in biology, neuroscience, biotechnology, as well as music history and aesthetics.NBN Episodes hosted by Melek Firat:
March 30, 2026
Food Chemistry in Small Bites
Food Chemistry in Small Bites takes readers on an up-close scientific journey through the transformation of food when meals are prepared. Organized in…
February 22, 2026
Spoiled
Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the populat…
July 22, 2025
Nature's Greatest Success
The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force--and the science behind it. Domesticated crops were not huma…
July 12, 2025
The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany
A new history of how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era. In the years after the Nazis came to power i…
June 16, 2025
The Color of North
An awe-inspiring journey into the world of proteins--how they shape life, and their remarkable potential to heal our bodies and our planet. Each fall…
March 25, 2025
Tchaikovsky's Empire
Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we …
March 18, 2025
What the Body Knows
What is our immune system, and how does it work? A vast array of cells, proteins and chemicals spring into action whenever our bodies are damaged, but…
February 28, 2025
Before Sound
In Before Sound: Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music (Transcript Verlag, 2023), composer Tiziano Manca investigates the premises for and …
January 19, 2025
Macroevolutionaries
One of the twentieth century's great paleontologists and science writers, Stephen Jay Gould was, for Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, also a clo…
December 21, 2024
The Clock in the Sun
On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks an…
December 14, 2024
The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries
Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to anot…
November 8, 2024
At the Edge of AI
How are human computation systems developed in the field of citizen science to achieve what neither humans nor computers can do alone? In At the Edg…
September 20, 2024
The Balanced Brain
There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific devel…
June 16, 2024
Women in Science Now
Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic pr…
January 26, 2024
The Naked Neanderthal
What do we really know about our cousins, the Neanderthals? For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. More recently, the pe…
December 20, 2023
The Cat's Meow
The domestic cat--your cat--has, from its evolutionary origins in Africa, been transformed in comparatively little time into one of the most successfu…
December 16, 2023
Every Brain Needs Music
Whenever a person engages with music--when a piano student practices a scale, a jazz saxophonist riffs on a melody, a teenager sobs to a sad song, or …
December 10, 2023
Forensic Colonialism
Forensic genetic technologies are popularly conceptualized and revered as important tools of justice. The research and development of these technologi…
October 23, 2023
Cro-Magnon
During the Last Ice Age, Europe was a cold, dry place teeming with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, bison, cave bears, cave hyenas, and cave l…
July 7, 2023
The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up
Sleep was taking over Anna's life. Despite multiple alarm clocks and powerful stimulants, the young Atlanta lawyer could sleep for thirty or even fift…
June 28, 2023
Science as a Cultural Human Right
The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, So…
June 24, 2023
The World Before Us
Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near E…
May 29, 2023
Less Heat, More Light
Climate change is one of the most hotly contested environmental topics of our day. To answer criticisms and synthesize available information, scientis…
May 2, 2023
Madness at the Movies
The study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies: Un…