Join us after the show on Sunday, March 19, 2017 for a discussion with Dr. Aubrey Milunsky, founder and co-director of the Centre for Human Genetics.

Dr. Aubrey Milunsky is the Founder of the non-profit Center for Human Genetics, now in it’s 34^th year.   He is a Co-Director  with his son, and is an Adjunct Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology  at Tufts University School of Medicine.  He was Professor of Human Genetics, Pediatrics, Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Pathology, and Director, Center for Human Genetics, Boston University School of Medicine, until his departure in December 2013.  He was born and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa.  He is triple-board certified in Clinical Genetics, Pediatrics and Internal Medicine.  He served as a medical geneticist at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital for 13 years before his professorial appointments at Boston University School of Medicine.  The Center’s laboratories are a major International Referral Center for molecular diagnostics and for prenatal genetic diagnosis, & privileged to receive samples from 45 countries, in addition to all states in the US.  The non-profit Center, is now in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He is the author and/or editor of twenty-five books including the 7^th edition (2016) of his major reference work Genetic Disorders and the Fetus:  Diagnosis, Prevention and Treatment, now co-edited with his son Jeff, who was Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics and Genomics at Boston University School of Medicine.  This book received the “Highly Commended” Award Certificate in 2010 from the British Medical Association.  His latest book for the lay public was published by Oxford University Press entitled Your Genes, Your Health:  A Critical Family Guide That Could Save Your Life. This book will appear in Indonesian. An earlier book (Know Your Genes) appeared in 9 languages. He is the author or co-author of over 400 scientific communications.

He has given hundreds of invited lectures, including in 34 countries and the Vatican.

In 1982 he was honored by election as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of England.  In 1982, his Alma Mater, the University of the Witwatersrand School of Medicine, conferred the D.Sc. degree for his work on the Prenatal Detection of Genetic Disorders.  He is an elected member of the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society, and a Founding Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics.  The Consumer Research Council of America has listed him repeatedly in their “Guide to America’s Top Pediatricians”.

He led the team that first located the gene for X-linked lymphoproliferative disease, first cloned the PAX3 gene for Waardenburg syndrome, and first demonstrated the 70% avoidance of spina bifida afforded by folic acid supplementation taken in the 3 months prior to pregnancy and the 3 months after conception.  He and his co-workers have made the first prenatal diagnosis of various genetic disorders including tuberous sclerosis.

Boston University School of Medicine has named the AUBREY MILUNSKY CHAIR IN HUMAN GENETICS.

Join Dr. Jean Berko Gleason, mother of psycholinguistics, for a post-show discussion to learn more about language acquisition and the nuances of Brodie’s work as a linguist.

Dr. Jean Berko Gleason is one of the world’s leading experts on children’s language and one of the founding mothers of the field of psycholinguistics. She created the Wug Test, the best known experimental study of children’s language acquisition. By asking children to make plurals and past tenses of words they have never seen before she demonstrated that even very young children have systematic knowledge of their language. She is the author and editor of leading textbooks on language development and psycholinguistics and has published more than 125 articles on aphasia, language attrition, language development in children, gender differences in parents’ speech, and parent-child interaction in the Hungarian Gypsy/Roma population.

She currently is professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Dr. Gleason has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Harvard, and the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard/Radcliffe, and an honorary doctorate from Washington & Jefferson College in 2016. She is a member of the Academy of Aphasia, has been president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language and of the Gypsy Lore Society. Her work is often cited in the professional literature, and has been featured in the popular press and on television. She is featured in the PBS award-winning online Nova Science Now series “The Secret Life of Scientists.”

Join the Boston Globe‘s Love Letters columnist Meredith Goldstein to talk relationships in Intimate Exchanges and beyond!

Meredith Goldstein is an advice columnist and entertainment reporter for The Boston Globe. Her advice column, Love Letters, is a daily dispatch of wisdom for the lovelorn that has been running online and in the paper for eight years. Meredith’s first novel, The Singles (2012), was about a group of dateless guests at a wedding. In 2018 she’ll release two books, a yet-to-be-titled memoir about writing an advice column (Grand Central), and Chemistry Lessons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a young adult novel about a young woman who tries to use science to manipulate her love life.

Join dramaturg and Ayckbourn expert, David Allen, to discuss all things Intimate Exchanges!

David has worked as an artistic associate at the Hartford Stage Company, where he was the staff dramaturg and director of education. He served as the production dramaturg on their production of Intimate Exchanges. Other production dramaturgy at Hartford Stage included A Servant of Two Masters, directed by Bart Sher, Cymbeline, Under Milk Wood and Tiny Alice, all directed by Mark Lamos and Light Up the Sky, directed by Daniel Sullivan. David additionally served as the manager of artistic operations at CST. He was also a literary associate and dramaturg for the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. Productions worked on included A Touch of the Poet, directed by Arvin Brown, An Enemy of the People, directed by John Tillinger, and numerous developmental works on the Theater’s “Stage Two,” including world premieres by Keith Reddin, Teresa Rebeck, and David Wiltse. In addition to professional theater work, David has been a professor of theater at the University of Hartford and Bridgewater State University. He was also the founding executive director the Community School of the Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, and the managing director of the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, a performing arts magnet high school.

Join Dr. Preston for a conversation on women’s agency in literature, theater, and Intimate Exchanges!

Carrie Preston, Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College, is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. Her most recent book, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia UP, 2016), considers the influence of Japanese noh theater on modernism with chapters on Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Ito Michio, Benjamin Britten, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Becket. She won the the De La Torre Bueno Prize in dance studies for Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford, 2011). She is the author of articles on modernism, performance, dance, and queer theory in publications including Modernism/modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Theater Journal.  Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Peter Paul Professorship. She was named the 2015 United Methodist Church Scholar-Teacher of the Year.