New to AMAs? AMA means ‘Ask Me Anything’ – the interviewee begins the process by starting a post, describing who they are and what they do. Then, commenters leave questions and can vote on other questions according to which they would like to see answered. The interviewee then goes through and responds to any questions that he/she would like, and in any way that he/she prefers.

About Rosie Redfield: Rosie is well-trained (PhD from Stanford, post-doctoral research at Harvard and Johns Hopkins), though not always well-behaved. Since 2006 she’s been writing openly about her day-to-day research on her RRResearch blog, whose tagline reads “Not your typical science blog, but an ‘open science’ research blog. Watch me fumbling my way towards understanding how and why bacteria take up DNA, and getting distracted by other cool questions.” In 2011 she achieved her 15 minutes of fame by critiquing (on RRResearch) the NASA-sponsored paper claiming that bacteria could construct DNA using arsenic instead of phosphorus, and in 2012 she led a team that showed this work to not be reproducible. Lately she’s been criticizing the current teaching of genetics, and putting her money where her mouth is by developing and teaching the free online course Useful Genetics. She tweets as @rosieredfield.

Useful Genetics begins September 9 – enroll now!