Meet a Volunteer: Crystal Lantz
Author: Shruti Muralidhar
Editor: Molly O’Connor
Dr. Lantz is a postdoctoral scientist and is currently working as a Visiting Faculty Specialist. She earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently in the process of transitioning to the next stage of her career.
Her main motivation to join the volunteer team comes from her desire and drive to be a helper. For example, her interest in using scientific thinking and data to drive policy drove her to become an Early Career Ambassador with the Society for Neuroscience (SfN).
Since her experimental skills at the bench do not directly translate to helping COVID-19 research or diagnostic work, she is using her policy experience to create change. As part of her volunteering with the NSVD, she is working with government officials to better deploy and utilize the database. As the testing capacities increase, she hopes to also add her analytics skills to the test to help better understand the spread and impact of the virus.
Capitalizing on one of her non-scientific skills as a sewer and quilter, she has also sewn over one hundred masks for essential workers, using her fabric stash which she has collected over the years!
Thank you for your contributions, Crystal!
About the Author: Shruti is a Social Media Coordinator at the NSVD. Currently, she works at the Picower Institute at MIT on understanding the role of inhibitory interneurons in learning and memory. She is also the contributing editor and co-founder of an Indian Science Communication collective called IndSciComm, that does scicomm to an Indian audience along with helping Indian and Indian-origin scientists improve their science communication skills. As part of this collective, she writes and helps produce podcasts in multiple Indian languages.
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