Kari Fischer, PhD is a habitual changemaker and boundary spanner, and a professional nerd. From her earliest days as a graduate student, through her time as a program manager and nonprofit grantmaker, she steadily chipped away at the norms that underlie scientific culture. As an Associate Director at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF), she managed early career awards that promoted a more diverse oncology research workforce, she bridged the divide between academia and industry with a investigator-led drug research program, and she launched the BCRF Global Data Hub—a centralized research portal to foster data sharing and collaboration. At the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), where Kari planned life sciences symposia and public programs, she changed her department’s approach to speaker diversity to promote equity in professional development for scientists. She also leveraged her events to develop a better understanding of how science can improve how it interfaces with the world, engaging with the topics of science misinformation and bioethics so deeply that she positioned NYAS as a thought leader at its first-ever panels at South by Southwest. Kari received her PhD at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she studied breast cancer metastasis and published in Nature. She attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (go UMASS!). Her science writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Scientist, and on the International Space Station.