Dr. Yara Haridi

And, you know, I'm Egyptian.

So in our culture, you can be a few things.

You can be a doctor.

You can be a pharmacist.

You can be an engineer or you can be a disappointment.

So what I decided to go into a science and try to at least go into being a doctor.

So studying for med school and man, I just wasn't enjoying it.

And the parts that I enjoyed were the anatomy, the physiology, how things worked.

As I was studying for med school, I volunteered in a paleo lab and I fell in love with paleontology.

And yeah, a couple of right turns turned left or a couple of left turns turned right.

And I got into paleo.

They offered me a master's and I continued from there.

That's a really good question.

And I can actually mark the point where it like happened.

They had me picking fossils and picking fossils is when you just sit on a microscope and you're like picking little microscopic, like little bones from salamanders or teeth.

And that was fun.

And I think the shape of fossils is interesting.

And I was just kind of mind blown that these were from the Permian.

So they were 280 plus million years old, which breaks your brain if you are not used to those numbers and who is.

But then there was a PhD student in the lab at the time, and he taught me this method called paleohistology and the study of tissues.