Let’s Talk! Advanced Research and Community with Neurodivergence_欧洲杯决赛竞猜app_欧洲杯足球网-投注|官网

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Let's Talk!, Let's Talk! Podcast Collective

Let’s Talk! Advanced Research and Community with Neurodivergence

Summary: Asher speaks with Leah about their experience with autism and neurodiversity, and how that has put them on the path to find ways to bring mental health care closer to those in need.

Hosted By: Asher Sham

Guest Speaker: Leah Blankenship

Produced By: Let’s Talk! Podcast Collective

Audio and Transcript Editing: Miri Newman

Web Hosting: Eugene Holden

Released on: 12/19/2025

More resources at our home website.

Episode Transcript

Transcript edited by Miri Newman

Introductions

Kylo: You are listening to Let’s Talk! Let’s Talk! is a digital space for students at PCC experiencing disabilities to share their perspectives, ideas, and worldviews in an inclusive and accessible environment. The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Portland Community College, PCC Foundation, or our community partners. We broadcast on our home website, pcc.edu/dca, on Spotify, on X-Ray 91.1 FM and 107.1 FM, and KBOO Community Radio, 90.7 FM.

Asher: Hello, Let’s Talk! listeners. Welcome back. My name is Asher, and today I have another special guest joining us. Her name is Leah Blankenship, and– actually, would you like to introduce yourself, your name, pronouns, and what you do??

Leah: Sure, yeah. I am Leah. I use any pronouns. I am a Ph.D candidate at the University of Oregon in the Institute of Neuroscience. I’m a PCC graduate myself. I am also the founder and co-president of the Neurodiversity Alliance at UO, as well as the founder of a new group called Neurodiversity Innovation Centers for Excellence in Neuroscience.

Why Neuroscience?

Asher: Thank you so much, Leah, for joining us today. I really appreciate you. What got you interested in studying neuroscience, and, more specifically, the lesser known but powerful parts of the brain? I’m really interested in hearing about that.?

Leah: Yeah, so I feel like I’ve kind of always been interested in biology and science in general. But I got interested in neuroscience more specifically when I was in middle school. My little brother is adopted from foster care in Oregon and has a lot of learning disabilities, due to fetal substance exposure, and I wanted to kind of learn and understand how his brain worked so that I could help him be successful in school. That kind of got me really interested in neuroscience and neurodiversity, even before I found out that I myself am autistic and neurodivergent. And I’m interested in small subcortical brain regions because I think those regions tend to be overlooked for the important role that they have in behavior. People tend to focus a lot on the regions that are the most different between humans and other animals. But I think that the more conserved brain regions, um, are super powerful for behavior across many animals.?

Asher: Oh, that’s really cool, yeah. What kind of, if you don’t mind me asking, and you don’t have to answer this, what kind of disabilities did your brother have that make you look into this?

Leah: Yeah. He, like I said, has like fetal substance exposure, so it can be hard to diagnose that as a particular disability. But the result for that for him was, I think it’s now called, Specific Learning Disorde r, which is kind of an umbrella term that includes, um, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, a lot of those kinds of famous learning disabilities. and ADHD..?

Asher: Thanks for sharing that with me. Yeah. I myself also was recently diagnosed with ADHD and I’m learning so much just about the different kinds of mental disabilities. I mean, even before I found out that I had ADHD, for the job that I’m doing right now. It’s just like learning a lot of things about disabilities, what kind of disabilities there are, and just how it impacts us in our day to day.

Leah: Yeah, definitely.

Studying the Habenula

Asher: So yeah, just with your doctorate work that focuses on the small but powerful brain region called the new, I’m probably, uh, butchering this and you can correct me. Hab… nula? Habnulla??

Leah: Habenula.?

Asher: Habenula.?

Leah: Yeah.?

Asher: Yeah, tell us more about it and what is it and what does it control??

Leah: Yeah, so the habenula as a whole tends to be stereotyped as responding to aversive stimuli. And basically what I mean by that is it tends to become more active during stress, or just during things that an animal might want to avoid. Then it activates, or inhibits other parts of the brain that might affect things like learning and motivation, right? But my lab focuses on the fact that individual cells within the habenula, which express different genes, individually play a role in different behaviors rather than the whole brain region doing one thing. So these cells that I’m personally studying in my own, work. play a role in aggressive behavior and might also play a role in opioid use and withdrawal.?

Asher: Wow. That’s, that’s a very big thing. I have so many questions now.?

Leah: Yeah.?

Asher: Yeah. How is it different for each person then, in this case? Is it the different chemicals in the brain? Or each of our brains and stuff like that??

Leah: Yeah, so that’s a good question. My lab works in mice, which are genetically identical, so they’re quite similar across different brain regions and stuff like that. We’re trying to kind of understand like how the system works on a basic level, so that future researchers can look more into that in people. But it’s interesting to ask that about like how it works in different people, because That kind of speaks to why we use mouse models a little bit. ’cause in human neuroscience it’s pretty limited in how deep you can get into the brain because of what techniques you can use on like a human versus a mouse, right? And so, what we do know though is from, you know, like FMRI studies and some other like clinical work, that some people might have like more or less activity in their habenula depending on their genes that they express as well as their development.?

Asher: What is FMRI? And you talked a little bit briefly on that is the, what’s the long term for it?

Leah: Yeah, so that’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. So a lot of people might have heard of just MRI before, like as a imaging technology. but FMRI has to do more with like tracking how the blood flow in different brain regions changes when a person is experiencing different things, or thinking about different things. That’s one of the main techniques that’s used in human neuroscience, but in mice we can do a lot more specific things to investigate the circuit that you couldn’t do in a, in a human. So.?

Asher: That’s really cool. How is it different with someone who is on the spectrum, whether it’s with ADHD, and autism and all that?

Leah: Yeah. So, we don’t totally know the answer to that question because like I said, in humans, like there’s only so deep you can get into the actual brain region and brain chemistry. But we do know, from both some human studies and mostly like rodent studies and other animals, that the habenula does play an important role in regulating social behavior and motivation, which are functions that are affected in autism and ADHD. Some people think, depending on who you talk to, that the habenula might be extra active in people with ADHD because it can inhibit dopamine release, which does tend to be inhibited in ADHD. But that’s, again, mostly mouse research. And it’s hard to say, you know, can a mouse have ADHD or autism? You know, like, so it’s, it’s all kind of just trying to investigate how the habenula affects those behaviors. And then that can have implications for things like autism, ADHD, or like my work, which focuses more on addiction too.?

Asher: That’s very interesting. How do you test, or well test, how do you experiment on these mice or test on these mice? I feel like that’s not really a good way to,?

Leah: Yeah, that’s a really big question because there’s like so many neuroscience techniques. But you know, if you’re trying to think about how do you show that a particular brain region is responsible for particular behaviors? Right. If that’s kind of the question you’re asking.?

Asher: Yes.?

Leah: And that’s kind of, I think, again, draws this question of like, well, in humans we can have a person do certain behaviors and then we can seek correlations between those behaviors and the activity in different regions of the brain. But, the techniques for manipulating the activity so that we can make a judgment about what causes changes in behavior is much harder to do in humans, like ethically. ’cause we don’t wanna manipulate human brain activity, and most of those methods that we might have for manipulating brain activity involve, like, surgery. Right? And you’re not gonna do that to people. But with mice it’s like: We can do those techniques. So one example of a technique that we might use to investigate how a certain part of the brain or certain cells affect behavior is that we can, in a mouse brain, do this like super microscopic, injection of this, uh… Basically we can make it so that the cells express this protein from a different animal that is light sensitive and can cause neurons to fire when a light comes into contact with this protein. And by neurons fire, I mean becoming like more active, right? It can cause neural activity if a light that’s the right color shines on this protein. And then what we can do is implant this like super microscopic fiber optic right above that brain region in the mouse, and then the mouse can run around and do all of its behavior and hang out. And then when we want to turn on or off those brain cells to see what happens, we can shine that light down. And then that can cause a change in the mouse’s brain activity. And then if the mouse’s behavior also changes, that can tell us that that brain region or those particular cells are like responsible or important for that behavior. And that’s something we could never do in a person. So it’s pretty cool.

Asher: No, that is very cool.?

Leah: Yeah.?

Asher: I can’t, I honestly can’t really imagine that, but it. Wow.?

Leah: Yeah. Think of a, think of a mouse with, like, a little LED on the top of your head.?

Asher: Like a little antenna on the head?

Leah: Yeah. And there’s some pretty cool videos if you look up — optogenetic experiments, is what it’s called– and if you look that up, you can see some pretty cool videos, like you can just turn the light on and the mouse will start doing something different than it was doing before because of how it affects the brain depending on where you put the protein, so. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.?

Asher: That’s very interesting. Cool. Yeah. Sorry, I’m getting really into my head, just thinking about it for a minute. Wow! That’s very cool. I wanna know more about it!?

Leah: It’s really exciting.?

Asher: Yeah. So going back to the hab… habenoola. Habanoola??

Leah: Habenula.?

Asher: Habenula! I’m gonna get it. One day, I’m gonna get it! Habenula! How does it like actually influence dopamine and serotonin? And you talked a little bit about it. And like is it a switch that turns like signals on and off, or does it have a filter and like fine tunes??

Leah: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, how the habenula influences dopamine or serotonin does kind of depend on which cells you’re talking about. So like I said, my lab is kind of interested in showing that different cells in the habenula do different things. The most famous habenula pathway that a lot of people have studied is one of the ways that it can regulate dopamine. In that pathway, it activates a different brain region, so it turns on this other brain region, and then when that region turns on, it shuts off the dopamine regions part of the brain. But you’re right that it’s not really like a switch that flips completely on and off. It’s more like fine tuning based on the specific conditions that an animal is in. So when the animal is in certain conditions– and when I say animal, that could be a person or a mouse, right?– when the animal’s in certain conditions, the extent of that effect, like the strength of that effect, is gonna be different depending on what it is that’s happening.

Asher: Is there a way to find out, like, that region, part of the brain, isn’t working in like the mice that you work with? Like whenever you’re doing experiments or something?

Leah: Like whether or not it’s working?

Asher: Whether it’s working or not, yeah.?

Leah: Yeah. So like I said, the mice that we work with are mostly pretty much genetically Identical. I would love to get more into studying natural diversity of brain structures, but as far as rodent work, like generally, except for really rare cases, like these parts of their brain are gonna be pretty similar across animals, as far as just general function. Now there is always gonna be some level of individual variability, depending on individual animals’ development. But for humans, there’s a lot of work that shows that function of different brain regions is super different across different people and across development. There’s some interesting work being done in Kate Mills’ lab here at UO, which is a psychology lab where they’re doing like MRI imaging of brains as they develop, and kind of looking at neurodiversity across different kinds of brains and throughout development. So in mice, like, you know, generally we’re studying their very, stereotyped brains as a way to understand the basics of how the system works. And then hopefully having a basic understanding of how the system works in a very average genetically stereotyped mammal can give us more information about, like, what we should expect in like healthy or unhealthy conditions, if that makes sense.

Asher: Yeah, no, definitely. That definitely makes sense. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about like, what are you testing right now as far as like on the mice and like if you can go into detail of that, I would love to hear?

Leah: Yeah.?

Asher: Like what goes on in your lab? Yeah.?

Leah: Yeah. So everyone in my lab kind of has pretty different projects, but my project in particular is looking at the role that these cells play in opioid use and withdrawal. So the habenula is very well known to, potentially play a role in addiction. It’s been studied in a lot of addiction studies, and there’s also some good research out there showing that if you mess with the opioid receptors in the habenula, if you alter those genes– specifically in the habenula– you get a decrease in withdrawal symptoms in animals. And so it would be really awesome for patients recovering from opioid use if we could figure out how to prevent withdrawal symptoms, or reduce the severity of withdrawal symptoms. Because that severity of withdrawal symptoms is one of the main reasons why people will relapse when they’re trying to recover from addiction. And so having an understanding of the basics of why does affecting the opioid receptors in the habenula cause a change to withdrawal behaviors? And if we could understand why, then maybe there are other specific genes in the habenula, like specific receptors, that we could target with certain drugs to try to like help people. But that, that work of actually like designing drugs and stuff that would like help people more, would be work that other people could do, kind of based on the basic understanding that I could build of how the system works, if that kind of makes sense.

Further Applications of Research

Asher: Would this research only be focused towards addiction, or would it also be able to like do a turnaround towards people who are struggling with burnout, or depression, or anxiety??

Leah: Sure. Yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s what I really love about basic research. So a lot of research can kind of be sorted into basic research or translational research, and what we mean by that is basic research is just trying to understand, “Hey, how does this thing work?” That could be space, that could be rocks, that could be the brain, but it’s just kind of trying to understand like, “Hey, how does this work?” Translational research is research that’s trying to go towards a goal of eventually helping human health, right? So I feel like my research kind of is on the line between those, where I’m trying to understand the basics of how the system works with hopes that there will be specific applications that someone could take to a more translational level. I love your question because I think that really highlights why basic research is so important. That usually when we try to understand a system in the brain, in the body, in the world, that ends up having implications for a lot of different things in life, not just the specific thing we started with. And actually like funding of basic research has been really called into question lately in like the current political climate, and there’s a lot of people saying we should defund basic research because they think it doesn’t help people. But really when we just understand how systems work, it helps in a lot of ways. So one example of this is that the opioid receptors in the brain are there for a reason, right? Like they’re not there because opioid drugs act on them. Opioid chemicals from plants, and then synthetic opioid chemicals act on those receptors because they’re a similar shape to the chemicals we naturally make in our body. So when you think about like endorphins, you’ve probably heard that word before. which, cause like a runner’s high, like that’s opioid chemicals, but those are made by our brain, not synthetically. And so those receptors have natural roles that they play in our brains, right? And opioid receptors, and the genes that code for opioid receptors, are known to play an important role in social behavior and social development in animals. And so understanding how these receptors act, how those part of the brain acts when those chemicals are present, even if it’s artificial chemicals, does tell us about social behavior in general. It tells us about those behaviors that are naturally affected in those parts of the brain. So part of what I’m doing in my project is also just trying to see like, “Well, when these cells become active, when we stimulate those cells, what does that do to social behavior?” And that can tell us stuff about opioid addiction and withdrawal, but that also tells us about the role that the opioid system plays in our natural social behavior. A great question. And researching the habenula is known to have, you know, potential implications for a lot of different things. Social behavior and the opioid system is what’s most relevant to my project, but a lot of people, including like other people in my lab, are studying other cells in the habenula that have more implications for things like depression. There’s a lot of research showing that the habenula is important for the way that chronic stress can result in depressive-like behavior. That chronic stress causes animals and humans alike to develop what’s called learned helplessness, that if a animal is in a constant state of stress, it can cause like depressive behavior. And actually, there’s one study that has been done where there was a patient, a human patient, who had treatment resistant depression and they put a deep brain stimulation probe, this implant that you can get. It’s usually used for things like Parkinson’s disease, but it’s basically like a pacemaker for part of your brain, right? And this patient, so it’s, you know, a really extreme case had this basically pacemaker put in their habenula and it cured their treatment resistant depression. And so I think research like that, like trying to understand like why did that help that patient? and are there less invasive ways that we can affect the system? needs this basic research on how the system works to be able to accomplish that. So.?

Asher: Oh, that’s so cool. Yeah. Did they have to keep the implant in their brain or did they take it out?

Leah: Yeah, so deep brain stimulation is permanent, you heal from the surgery and it just stays in there, kind of like a pacemaker. If you know anyone who has a pacemaker, usually they implant it and then it just stays there for the rest of their life. And they’ve been looking into deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s patients a lot, but they’re starting to branch out and doing it in other brain regions. It’s a really like, last ditch effort kind of surgery right now. It’s not something that most people will ever get, but, I think the proof of concept in that study tells us why we should want to study these brain regions, right? And if we have a better understanding of, you know, deep brain stimulation is a serious procedure that’s really intense. But if we learned the circuitry of the system really well, and we learn what genes are expressed there, what other receptors are present there that might not be in other brain regions, we could maybe design other less invasive ways to target those things. And I think in order to be able to develop that kind of tool or treatment, we first need to just have a basic understanding of how the system works. And that’s kind of what labs like my lab try to do.

Asher: I do not understand why people would wanna like. Defund, stuff like that. It’s like trying to do [incomprehensible],?

Leah: Yeah, beats me. Exactly. Yeah.?

Asher: Like that’s the basic of like how you learn. Why would you try to defund it when we’re trying to like discover more things?

Leah: Exactly. I think a lot of people look at basic research and think that it’s useless ’cause they don’t see a direct application. Like, for example, people getting government research grants to go study some crazy animal out in the rainforest or something. People say that’s a waste of money. That’s not gonna help anyone. But there’s so many cases where the study of weird animals or interesting geology or interesting stuff in the brain ends up leading to something that we had no idea existed. There’s lots of strange animals that were just studied for the sake of studying them, that then inspired the development of new medicines based on like snake venom, or they inspired the development of new robotics based on understanding how those animals move and work. So I think a lot of people just have a hard time connecting those dots between something that appears useless or frivolous, waste of money, actually is like really important for understanding like how our world works and how biology works. So.?

Asher: I would, I would like to go like into deep ocean and like find out more.?

Leah: Yeah!?

Asher: Like antenna fish or?

Leah: Exactly.?

Asher: Not antenna fish, they’re called tripod fish. I don’t know if you’ve heard of those types of fishes before.

Leah: I’ve heard of it. Yeah.?

Asher: Stand on the ground. And it’s so weird. It blows my mind. I don’t claim to be a scientist or be good in science in general, but, and also just for other people: How are we able to help, like fund or support research like this, if it’s possible.

Leah: A lot of the decisions are out of our hands, ultimately, but I think just, remembering how important those things are and when we interact with people like in our lives who maybe are less convinced of that, being able to have that explanation ready, you know, of like, “What? No. Like it seems like some, like, we might not understand why some of this research is important, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not.” And a lot of those basic research steps are so important to eventually arrive at something and we don’t know until we try it. You know, and maybe someday a lot of these things don’t end up getting some kind of great translational application, but a lot of them might. And it’s worth trying, you know? But it is hard. It’s hard. to make those decisions as like individuals. Like so much of that is out of our power, but like really it comes down to how we vote, calling our representatives. Thankfully right now, Oregon has been continuing to be supportive of research and generally like biomedical information. Oregon is joined up with the West Coast Health Alliance to form our own resource of basically what the CDC has been providing, because they disagree with the way a lot of the science and the CDC has been undermined lately. So I’m grateful to be practicing science here in Oregon, but I think, yeah, just, voting with our values and, when those values are being threatened, calling our representatives, doing all of those important things to make sure that government funding for science sticks around is just really important.

Asher: I really appreciate, like you and whoever else is in your lab working on like treatments for addiction and other things. And just like being the first.?

Leah: Yeah. We hope that someone will be able to develop those based on our work someday.?

Asher: Yeah. Well that’s, your work is very important too. Just being like the first like stepping stones into that area of exploration.?

Leah: Exactly.?

The Neurodiversity Alliance

Asher: With that, you are the founder of the Neurodiversity Alliance at U of O. What is this organization? What do they do and how are they helping students who are on the spectrum??

Leah: The Neurodiversity Alliance is a fully neurodivergent run student group here on campus, which provides peer mentoring, community, and resources to neurodivergent students here at UO. We also just generally try to make our campus like a better, more inclusive place of all kinds of minds. We’re still a relatively new group. We started in fall of 2022, but we’re growing a lot and working towards those goals. We now have over 200 members in the club, which is pretty exciting. But yeah, we help all kinds of students. There’s a wide, wide variety of neurodiversity within the club, specifically for autistic students. We connect autistic students with each other. Having autistic friends was one of the biggest things that made a huge difference in my life when I first started college. And so I think providing students with a place to find those people who they really feel safe to be themselves around is really huge for academic and career success. Like: being able to always have a community that you can fall back on when things feel like they’re not working, maybe in other relationships, or in your courses, is just so important. But we also help students learn how to advocate for themselves, so we teach students how to send emails to their professors properly, how to talk to their graduate students in office hours, how to do all of those things that aren’t just taught to you but are an important skill to learn. But then, yeah, we have all kinds of resources for all kinds of students. We’re currently working on a UO Club website, but we’re working on making up our public website so that the resources we’ve developed for our students can be more accessible to people outside of the group, which would be really awesome. We do really just a lot of things. We have a variety of different types of meetings that we run that help students in different ways. So some of them are very neurodivergent oriented social meetings that help neurodivergent students like, be more social with each other in a way that isn’t restrained by neurotypical ideas of what that looks like. An example of that is that every term we hold a special interest in hyperfixation fair, where students can like give mini presentations about the thing that they’re obsessed with. And it gets students much more confident talking to other people because that’s their thing that they feel confident talking about. Then we also have like discussion meetings where. We talk about some topic that’s relevant to neurodivergent and disabled student success and just workshop those topics together, which is where a lot of our resources have come from. Like we have a lot of recommendations and tips for students on a bunch of different things, whether that’s studying, finding housing, like all of that stuff that goes into being a successful neurodivergent adult. We have like a very, very active online community too, which is like a huge part of the group. We have a Discord server that is like super active and students use it all the time for like studying, asking questions. It makes the club a lot more accessible to people because there’s a place where they can get help without needing to like come in in person if they’re overstimulated or whatever it is. So it’s just a great resource to have and I think what’s been really great now, especially that I’m a grad student, is I’m not the only neurodivergent grad student in the group. Or like, there’s a lot of, like neurodivergent upperclassmen always just have so much good advice to provide to new students so that they don’t have to learn everything the hard way, you know?

Asher: Love that.?

Leah: Um, but yeah, so we do a lot of things. It’s hard to summarize in one short blurb, but it’s, it’s a pretty fun thing to be part of. Yeah.?

Asher: That’s really cool. Yeah. Do all these like events and meetings, are they mainly for students or are they also open to like the community??

Leah: Yeah, so unfortunately all of our events so far have been just for UO students, ’cause that’s kind of like what we exist as a group. And um, that’s kind of where our funding comes from is because it’s for UO students. But there’s a lot of great, groups out there that are more open to community participation. And like I said, even though our meetings and stuff just serve UO students, we are trying to publish more of our like, resources publicly so that like anyone could benefit from them.

Asher: Where are they? Can you tell us??

Leah: Yeah, so like I said, we’re working on it, so.

Asher: Oh, okay.?

Leah: That’s kind of our big project. It’s our big project for this year is to get our like public website up and running. But we did this year become an official affiliate of the Autistic Self-advocacy Network. Uh, ASAN, which is an excellent organization if people are not aware of. And so we’re listed as an official affiliate on their site, and hopefully as soon as that website is up and running, it’ll be posted to their site as well as a place people can come find us. So,?

Asher: That’s very good. With that, any additional information or resources you can provide for students, especially from PCC, since that’s where Main Landing Zone is for Let’s Talk.

Leah: Definitely. Generally, like I really recommend checking out the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. They have some great resources for autistic college students. They have a conference that they run every year. It’s kind of like a training that’s called Autism Campus Inclusion, and it’s literally like a training for autistic students doing disability advocacy on college campuses. I did that a few years ago and it was awesome. So because they run that, they have a lot of great resources for neurodivergent college students. As for like general advice, I think really the big thing is like, find other neurodivergent students, like that’s the best resource that you have to be successful. Find disability student groups, talk to groups that are centered on your niche interests. That’s how you know I started the Neurodiversity Alliance. So what I was looking for neurodivergent friends to make, on campus, I went and sought out a Dungeons and Dragons group because that’s a great way to find neurodivergent people. But yeah, learning from like more experienced neurodivergent and disabled peers is like such a great resource. And, you know, a lot of the advice that’s out there for being successful in college doesn’t always work for different kinds of brains and different kinds of bodies, and I think learning from the people who have that experience is just a really great way to make that progress.?

Closing Thoughts

Asher: Do you have any, closing thoughts for us? Do you have anything to tell us about as far as like your research, or how to support what you’re doing.

Leah: Um, I don’t think I have any like specific, thoughts in particular on, on that subject, but I maybe as a closing remark, would just like encourage any neurodivergent college students out there that are listening. And there were a lot of times like, I didn’t think that I could get to where I’m at now, but I promise that if you, you know, do the hard work to figure out like what techniques work best for you to be successful, it’s a big upfront investment to figure out like what will work and, you know, learning that it’s hard to seek out help, but it’s worth doing. Anyone can get to where I’m at with that willingness to, to really figure that out, as far as like from the perspective of being a disabled student. Like that, it added a lot of challenges. It’s harder to be a disabled Ph.D candidate than it is to be a non-disabled Ph.D candidate. But, uh, if you want to go that direction, it’s worth trying.?

Asher: Yeah, for sure. And thank you so much for talking to us about all this and really appreciate the work that you’re doing, and just paving the way for a lot of other students. I really appreciate it.

Leah: I really appreciate it.?

Asher: Thank you listeners for tuning in. Thank you so much, Leah.?

Leah: Thank you.

Kylo: Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk!, Portland Community College’s broadcast about disability culture. Find more information and resources concerning this episode and others at pcc.edu/dca. This episode was produced by the Let’s Talk! Podcast Collective as a collaborative effort between students, the Accessible Education and Disability Resources department, and the PCC multimedia department. We air new episodes on our home website, our Spotify channel,?X-Ray 91.1 FM and 107.1 FM, and KBOO Radio, 90.7 FM.