 Hello and welcome to In the Studio. I'm your host today, Alex Silva-Satter, and my guest is Lynn Weaver, who you may recognize from Talking Point, one of our shows on Davis Community Television. And today we're going to do a little profile and find out some more about Lynn. So Lynn, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thank you for inviting me and wanting to talk a little about me. I'm sorry, there's a little lag, but what brought you to volunteer at Davis Media Access? Well, thank you very much for asking that question because I've been wanting to talk about that. Well, after I left Capitol Public Radio, where I worked as an associate producer for four years, mainly I was working for the Daily Show Insight with Jeffrey Callison. I wanted to be more connected with the Davis community. After all, I live in Davis and I wanted to do something. I read about Davis Media and I was very impressed with the range of TV and radio shows they offered. And the many services they provided to children, teens, and grown-ups. So I decided to volunteer. I thought I could help in some way. Okay. And how did you transition to being a host and producer? Oh, well, that is another story. So I was helping a little bit as sound engineer and also I wanted to learn. I was learning a little bit how to use the TV cameras. And then the regular host for in the studio was going back to Australia. And someone asked me if I wanted to try to find a good topic and host in the studio. Well, I knew how to produce a show, but I had no idea about hosting a TV show. I'd never been in front of a TV camera. So the first time, well, I can tell you, it wasn't pretty. Because when I found out that we would not use a teleprompter and I had prepared an exceedingly long introduction to the topic. And much of it was off point. My poor gas looked a bit resigned to listen to me. And I felt it was a disaster. But I remember afterwards, Autumn went over the show with me and she was so kind. Somehow I passed the test. And Autumn is our executive director for anyone who doesn't know. So she's been in front of the camera before. So she's used to it. So do you feel more confident now that you've done it many, many times? I mean, you host your own show talking point, where you interview people. Yes. I feel much more confident, except for the first 30 seconds when I see that red dot. And I'm staring at the red dot. And all of a sudden I think, oh, I can't remember anything. Fortunately, the guests have been still helpful. I let them talk a lot. That's good. You're there to hear from them, right? So originally you're from Massachusetts. And what brought you from Massachusetts out to Davis, California in the first place? Well, my family and I had lived in Boston in the Boston area since I first came to this country from Europe with my husband. And I had been a college teacher. I got my MA at Tufts University, and then I went on to be a college teacher part-time while my children were growing up. And later I became a software consultant for various tech companies. Mostly I was doing voice recognition work and writing scripts and parsing them for the audio, to build audio models. So I brought up three wonderful children and they were now grown up and away from home. So my husband was a biophysicist and the chair of the physics and astronomy department at Tufts University. And he was impressed with the research in his field being down at the Genome Center at UC Davis. So we decided to spend the 2006 sabbatical years in Davis. Well, he passed away suddenly in April of that year. And I decided to continue our journey west and set up an endowment in his honor at the Genome Center. So could you tell us a little about the endowment at the biology, the Genome Center at UC Davis? Sure. The children and I set up an endowed lectureship. It has a long name at the Genome Center where David was going to collaborate with one of the scientists there. It's called the David L. Weaver Endowed Lectures for Biophysics and Computational Biology. We have had a lecture every year since then and we were very lucky to have a prominent physicist and biophysicist and even a couple of Nobel Prize. And last April was going to be the 14th year, but unfortunately we couldn't, we had to cancel because of COVID-19. The endowment brings the scientists to UC Davis for two days and there is a public lecture which is open to the public and it's sort of in lay people terms, but sometimes it's always about me. And then two days, the second day spent interacted with young scientists and we're very proud of what the children and I have done in honor of David. So if you have the time, everybody can come. The next one, unfortunately, it's scheduled for April 21, 2021. Sorry, I'm being muddled here. All right. And is that the Weaver Award? Is that what goes to scientists or is that another separate? The Weaver Award is actually another foundation that we are setting up for the Center for Neuroscience and that is a travel award for PhD students, graduate students, and very young faculty to go to travel to conferences and to share their latest results in their research and also interact with other people around the world. So that is, there's an article that they published about me at the Center for, at the Genome Center and you can follow the link if you're interested. But I also wanted to talk, I also, if I may, since you've been so kind to ask all the right questions, if I may, I'd like to talk a little bit about how I got to work for Capital Public Radio after I came to Davis. So when I got to Davis, of course, it was a very difficult time of my life and I felt very lonely. I was still consulting for a voice recognition software company back in Boston, but I really needed a change and I needed to interact with people in this area. So I was intrigued by the program insight I would listen to every morning and especially I was intrigued by the quality of the interviews and the topics. So when I read they were looking for unpaid interns, I wrote to them and during my interview, I said, well, I'm not 20 anymore, but maybe you can use me for my technical skills. So they took me on as an intern and six months later, I was hired. We were a very small team. And so I learned to do so many things. I learned, first of all, I learned how to find interesting topics in the papers or online. And remember, this was a daily show with three topics each day. And so I became, I was helping to find the topics, to pre-interview the guests on the phone and also coordinate there, coming to the studio and so on. I also helped with audio editing quite a bit when we couldn't get the guests to come into the studio. And Jeffrey Callison would record the phone conversation. And at times I would also do the sound engineering, which was always traumatic because it was a live show. And so we had to do all sorts of things. So I loved it. I loved it. And but I think I love to work for Davis Media even more, I mean, to volunteer with Davis Media. Well, that's fantastic that you got such a broad background. And you mentioned earlier, this will be our final question because we're running out of time, but you mentioned that you came from Europe originally. So could you tell us maybe a little bit about that and the languages you speak, because most people from Europe? Yes. Well, I was born in Europe. I was actually born in Berlin, Germany, because my father worked for the Foreign Service. But then after that, our family languages were French and Italian. And we traveled all over Europe, but I finally was sent to a school in France. And then after that, I attended the University of Geneva, where I studied linguistics and economics. And I met my husband when he was visiting CERN in Geneva. And I was working as a scanner. It was a university job. I was paid by the hour. And I would go to CERN every afternoon after my classes and just click little buttons to check some of the prune tone pictures that they had been scattered in the cyclotron. So to me was a complete discovery of a new world. And that's where I met David. We got married in France, and we came to the United States. And that's about it. You made it all of me here to Davis. Yes, a long journey west. Well, thank you very much, Lin, for sharing your background and what you've been working on recently with us and your time at Capital Public Radio. And that's all we have time for today and in the studio. And thank you everyone for watching. And if you'd like to find out more about the Weaver Award or the David L. Weaver Endowed Lecture Series, you can follow the links that will be in the description below the show. Thank you. Thank you so much, Alex.