It’s probably fairly obvious from my work, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how academic work is made as accessible and useful to others as possible. And so I get excited when I see PhD students embrace the idea of translating or “mobilizing” their research as part of their scholarship.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out the new Mission: Interplanetary podcast from ASU and Slate, I’d highly recommend it–and not just because my co-host is the fabulous former astronaut and ASU Global Explorer in Residence Dr. Cady Coleman! With the podcast, we set out to explore fresh perspectives on how we think about space. And I think we’re doing a pretty good job so far.

Back in March, I was asked to give the first FRANKx lecture at ASU. These lectures are designed to draw on ASU experts and visionaries who “strive to challenge, disrupt and redefine the landscape of higher education with innovative ideas that encourage conversation and thinking outside the status quo.”

It’s easy to get caught up in big ideas and grand notions of what’s important as we think about global futures–climate change, planetary health, complex systems, global governance, and so on. But how we imagine, design, and set about building the future is also deeply dependent on the finest details of technologies we create, and the risks as well as the opportunities that these open up. And these in turn are often rooted in a fine-grained understanding of the tangible world we inhabit. This is something I’ve been thinking about quite deeply over the past few days as I’ve followed a breaking story around the potential health risks associated with an engineered nanomaterial that’s being used in some face masks.

Back in January 2019 I got an email from my good friend and colleague Lance Gharavi with the title “Podcast brainstorming.” Two years on, we’ve just launched the Mission: Interplanetary podcast–and it’s amazing!

It’s been a long journey — especially with a global pandemic thrown in along the way — but on March 23, the Mission: Interplanetary podcast with Slate and ASU finally launched.

This is a story about giving–you have been warned! It’s also a story about empowering students. And importantly, it’s a story about small acts of kindness that can have a profound impact on student success. The short version is that my wife and I have just launched the Final Mile Fund in Arizona State University’s College of Global Futures to help students in the final stretch of completing their degree–and we really need your help growing the fund.

Slate and Arizona State University are partnering on the new podcast Mission: Interplanetary, and it’s going to be unlike anything you’ve heard — literally. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Tune-in,

Why do we have a College of Global Futures at Arizona State University? There are, of course, multiple reasons for this. And there are similarly many different threads to the

I’m sure that every generation has a point where its members believe they are at a pivotal point in human history. Sadly, generational exceptionalism rarely stands the test of time.