Faculty Experts

Since his band teacher went alphabetically by last name, Jeff Scott’s choices were limited when it came his turn to pick an instrument. The sixth grader pointed to the French horn—and the rest is history. Today, Scott is one of the nation’s premier French horn players and a Grammy-winning composer. Among other accomplishments, he’s played on Broadway, toured with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Ray Charles, and co-founded a world-renowned woodwind quintet. In this laughter-filled episode, Scott tells host Cory Nealon about his unlikely path to musical success, his experiences on the road with A-list artists, what it felt like to win a Grammy, and how his multicultural upbringing in Queens, N.Y., shaped the urban classical music he shares with the world today.

As a child, Joyce Hwang loved the way animals would create little disturbances in the human-made landscape. Now the intersection between animals and the built environment is the focus of her architectural practice and teaching. In this episode, she explains why designing our buildings and yards to accommodate non-human species is critical for both their welfare and ours.

As a clinical audiologist, Henry Louis Taylor Jr. wondered why his Black patients faced starkly different socioeconomic realities than his white patients. So he became an urban historian and planner, and now seeks to reform a neighborhood development system rooted in inequities. In this episode, he discusses his most ambitious effort yet: The East Side Neighborhood Transformation Project.

Obsessed with true crime shows as a teen, Mary Bush naturally gravitated toward forensics as a young dental school professor. In this episode, she talks about her efforts to banish bitemark evidence from the U.S. court system, how she copes with the emotional toll of victim identification, and what it was like to appear on Netflix’s hit show “Unsolved Mysteries.”