Prom Night: Stories from Proton Prom
b"In this week\\u2019s episode we\\u2019re sharing some of the stories from our second annual fundraiser Proton Prom.\\nPart 1: Comedian Josh Gondelman is terrified when he gets a call that his father doesn\\u2019t remember there\\u2019s an ongoing pandemic.\\nPart 2: Growing up Ken Ono dreams of being anything but a mathematician.\\nPart 3: As a teenager, Eric Jankowski is inspired when he meets his science heroes.\\nJosh Gondelman is a writer and comedian who incubated in Boston before moving to New York City, where he currently lives and works as the head writer and an executive producer for\\xa0Desus & Mero\\xa0on Showtime. Previously, he spent five years at\\xa0Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,\\xa0first as a web producer and then as a staff writer where he earned four Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, and three WGA Awards. In 2016, Josh made his late night standup debut on\\xa0Conan\\xa0(TBS), and he has also performed on\\xa0Late Night With Seth Meyers\\xa0(NBC) and\\xa0The Late Late Show with James Corden\\xa0(CBS). Gondelman is also the author of the essay collection\\xa0Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results\\xa0published September 2019 by Harper Perennial. And as of 2019, he has become a regular panelist on NPR mainstay\\xa0Wait Wait Don\\u2019t Tell Me.\\xa0In Spring 2020, Gondelman launched his own podcast\\xa0Make My Day, a comedy game show. And he was the co-creator of the popular\\xa0Modern Seinfeld\\xa0Twitter account. Josh\\u2019s most recent album\\xa0Dancing On a Weeknight\\xa0came out in 2019 on Blonde Medicine Records. (His prior album\\xa0Physical Whisper\\xa0debuted in March of 2016 at #1 on the iTunes comedy charts (as well as #4 on the Billboard comedy chart). Offstage, Gondelman\\xa0is also the\\xa0co-author (along with Joe Berkowitz) of the book\\xa0You Blew It,\\xa0published October 2015 by Plume. In the past, Josh has written for Fuse TV\\u2019s\\xa0Billy On The Street. His\\xa0writing has also appeared in prestigious publications such as McSweeney\\u2019s Internet Tendency, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker. Additionally, Josh has performed at the Rooftop Comedy Festival in Aspen, CO, and headlined at the Laugh Your Asheville Off Festival in Asheville, NC. More recently he has appeared in the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and SF Sketchfest. His debut standup comedy CD,\\xa0Everything\\u2019s The Best\\xa0was released in November of 2011 by Rooftop Comedy Productions. \\nKen Ono is the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia and the Chair of Mathematics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published over 200 research articles in number theory. Professor Ono has received many awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship. He was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) by Bill Clinton in 2000, and he was named the National Science Foundation's Distinguished Teaching Scholar in 2005. He was an associate producer of the 2016 Hollywood film The Man Who Knew Infinity, which starred Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Earlier this year he put his math skills to work in a Super Bowl week commercial for Miller Lite beer. \\nEric Jankowski is an associate professor in the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering at Boise State University as well as Story Collider\\u2019s Board President. He earned a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Michigan where he also got pretty into bicycles, storytelling, and playing go. Eric's research leverages high performance computing to engineer new materials for sustainable energy production. \\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices"