50 episodes listed below
Local STEM careers, told plainly.
Fun with the Maryland STEM Festival is a career-window podcast built from short interviews with people working across Maryland’s STEM ecosystem. Episodes move from job duties and education paths to mentors, outreach work, travel, hobbies, and festival events.
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Fun with the Maryland STEM Festival is a practical, community-minded interview show centered on STEM people in Maryland and nearby institutions. Each episode usually begins with a guest’s current role, then works backward through education, early curiosity, mentors, setbacks, and surprising turns. The pace is conversational and uncomplicated. It favors clear answers over production gloss. Recent guests include computer and systems engineers, construction project engineers, cybersecurity professionals, educators, federal IT leaders, Navy-connected technologists, and organizers building student programs. The show is especially strong when it lets STEM sound ordinary in the best sense: people coordinating with teams, reviewing curriculum, managing risk, troubleshooting laptops, building secure systems, flying test hardware, or helping students see a field they had not considered. Career routes are treated with welcome specificity. Alina Momin talks about tinkering, a gap year, a robotics startup, UMBC, and work at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Ashley Purcella connects buildings, civil engineering, construction sites, STEM for Her, and ballet. Maria Roat traces IT leadership through government, Navy experience, cybersecurity, policy, and travel to Antarctica. Erin Sutton brings mechanical design, the Dragonfly mission, test flights near APL, a motorcycle-part patent, and Turkish into the same career story. Other episodes move through ReadyForCyber, SAIC, Champs Camp, MAP Technologies, Project Jammie, Naval STEM, and student-facing outreach. The show’s educational value comes from its accumulation of examples. It does not reduce STEM to slogans. It shows how many doorways exist: internships, military training, classrooms, nonprofits, scholarships, co-ops, hobbies, and local events. Festival updates and announcements keep the series tied to Maryland STEM activity.
Made for: Best for students, parents, educators, career changers, and Maryland-area listeners who want concrete examples of STEM work and outreach. It also suits anyone looking for approachable career stories rather than technical lectures.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its local, ground-level view of STEM: job duties, school paths, community programs, and festival events appear in the same conversation. It makes professional trajectories feel discoverable without stripping away the practical details.
Short interviews with the people and organizations that make the Maryland STEM Festival such a success
A scaled-down Titan lander gets a pilot; Phil Rogofsky asks the question you'd ask: how high?
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded career story about curiosity, detours, and engineering work connected to critical infrastructure.
Episode 523 frames computer and systems engineering as a day-to-day practice: collaborative, security-minded, and tied to systems people depend on.
Ashley Purcella brings construction, STEM outreach, and ballet into one approachable career portrait.
Women's History Month gives this episode a natural frame for Ashley Purcella's path from Miss Silver Spring to project engineer at Whiting Turner.
A grounded career conversation on Navy IT, military leadership, and federal technology work.
Maria Roat's route from Navy IT operations into senior federal IT leadership gives the episode a practical, career-level shape. The conversation treats systems work as more than hardware and implementation: budgets, policy, stakeholders, cybersecurity, AI, and cross-government…
A grounded look at APL, Titan flight testing, and the engineering choices behind a research career.
The standout image is a scaled-down test vehicle taking flight at a farm near APL, tied to a lander intended for Titan and grounded by the very practical need to lift off, fly, land, and keep a certified pilot close as backup.
A grounded conversation on making cybersecurity part of everyday learning and workforce development.
Cybersecurity is framed here as a shared civic skill, with Sean Flowers describing how ReadyForCyber brings practical awareness into math, science, history, foreign-language classes, and other parts of school life.
Long-form conversations about what education is for.
School stories, told close to the classroom.
Science teaching, modeled from the classroom out.
Faculty conversations on sepsis, sunscreen and science fiction.
Alina Momin, a computer and systems engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, describes protecting cyber, physical, and industrial control systems inside the critical infrastructure protection group.
Maria Roat describes serving as Deputy Federal CIO in the White House, where she calls the job the place “where the sausage is made” for federal IT, cybersecurity, AI, and budget policy.
Erin Sutton explains why Dragonfly is a UAV for Titan, not a Mars-style rover.
Sean Flowers says ReadyForCyber was founded in 2023 as a cybersecurity workforce development nonprofit that builds custom curriculum for schools, colleges, and organizations.
Sandra Dorsey, an SAIC cybersecurity governance, risk, and compliance manager, explains how information security work evolved from web applications in 1998 and 1999.
Mike Peace, a 17-year Baltimore City Schools educator, runs MAP Technologies at 322 West Baltimore Street, a gaming lounge and event space that grew from a 2005 repair shop on Bel Air Road.
Host Bill Rogofsky interviews Melissa Thompson, an Albert Einstein Fellow at the Department of Defense, about her work in Naval STEM education.
Interview with Olenka Oderin, executive director of Black Women in Blockchain, discussing blockchain, Web3, AI, and ESG.
Interviews with participants and organizers of the Maryland STEM Festival, highlighting STEM activities and celebrating Women's History Month.
Host Phil Rogofsky interviews Jasmine Suarez about her role as a cyber workforce ecosystems advisor and her work in national cybersecurity workforce development.