Host David Ritter, MA is joined by Lotte Mulder, PhD and Kamran Mirza, MD, PhD, FASCP to discuss their new book, Mia the Marvelous Lab Explorer. The adventure follows Mia, a superhero and scientist, who uses laboratory science to explain why a friend has fallen ill with leukemia. The book targets children ages 5 to 9 years and balances striking entertaining and engaging tone with explaining scientific concepts accurately to a younger audience. Their conversation of the book expands into strategies for fostering engagement in laboratory science across age groups, how children’s literature can highlight the role of the lab to parents as well as younger readers, and how the format of a children's book fits into the undeclared student to laboratory professional pipeline ASCP is working to create.

Additionally, there is currently a fundraiser underway to donate 1,000 copies of the book to pediatricians' offices, libraries, and schools under the hashtag #MissionMarvelous. If you would like to contribute to the fundraiser, you can do so here: miathemarvelous.com. The fundraiser runs through February 16, 2026.

Interim CEO of ASCP and host Dr. Ali Brown sits down with Dr. Eric Konnick and Michelle Campbell, MLS(ASCP) to discuss lessons learned from the latest efforts to place laboratory developed tests under FDA oversight. For listeners unfamiliar with LDTs, they begin by establishing what LDTs are and what their value to the lab and patient safety are before debunking common misunderstandings cited by patient advocacy groups regarding their accuracy, validity, and the transparency with which they’re developed. They go on to define what FDA oversight would mean for laboratories in terms of cost, time, and labor, contextualizing these added costs in ongoing workforce shortages in the lab.

They close their conversation by spotlighting which efforts ASCP and similar organizations made to advocate for the lab were most successful, and describe alternative strategies for updating laboratory regulations, such as modernizing CLIA.

Host Constantine “Aki” Kanakis, MD is joined by Brittany Teeter and Sean to provide lessons learned and real-world takeaways from the world of laboratory management. This episode offers a glimpse into what seasoned lab managers learned across the course of their careers and provides concrete takeaways for lab managers at any stage of their careers on preparing for inspections, creating staff buy in for workflow updates, and relating the success of the lab to a hospital’s financial outcome when interfacing with C-suite executives. Their conversation offers fresh perspective on how to approach meeting regulatory standards as opportunities for improvement rather than mere hurdles to clear.

In this episode, their discussion covers disaster preparedness, addressing both how labs can prepare proactively for the foreseeable and how to reactively respond to the unforeseeable. They provide tips on everything from preparing for novel infectious outbreaks to stocking enough extension cords and flashlights in the event of power outages. They include valuable anecdotes about times thing went wrong in their lab, and what they did to react in a state of crisis.