It's International Women's Day! (Patreon)

Happy International Women's Day! To celebrate we are resharing Q&As from our archives with some of the women that make Deep Look possible.  First, let's meet Deep Look's coordinating producer Gabriela Quirós. Gabriela’s health reporting led her to become interested in animals that suck our blood. 

 Deep Look coordinating producer Gabriela Quirós offers up her arm for a mosquito to bite. (Photo Credit: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

For Gabriela’s 2016 episode, "How Mosquitoes Use Six Needles to Suck Your Blood,” she attempted to get bitten by a mosquito, so that the bite could be filmed. No mosquitoes bit her, though. The video features mosquitoes digging into several scientists instead. This is Deep Look’s most watched video, with over 21 million views, and it won a People’s Voice Webby Award.

Read on to find out about a few of the amazing women scientists Gabriela has worked with over the years to make her award-winning videos.

                  Shannon Bennett gets bitten by a mosquito on camera. (Gabriela Quirós/KQED)

Shannon Bennett, Chief of Science at the California Academy of Sciences, pictured above, let herself be bitten by an uninfected common house mosquito during the production of Gabriela’s mosquito video. Read a full Q&A with Bennett from our archives here.

                  Kerry Padgett collects young ticks off of a white flag that she previously dragged along the forest floor in Berkeley’s Tilden Park  (Courtesy of Kerry Padgett).

Kerry Padgett is the laboratory chief of the High Risk Pathogens Section at the California Department of Public Health in Richmond, California. Padgett, an expert on ticks who has a doctorate in ecology from the University of California, Davis, advised Gabriela on her video, “How Ticks Dig in with a Mouth Full of Hooks,” a Deep Look fan favorite with over 5 million views. Read a full Q&A with Padgett from our archives here.

        Carolyn Elya is a researcher at Harvard who studies how the fungus Entomophthora muscae manipulates the behavior of fruit flies. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)

In Deep Look’s video This Killer Fungus Turns Flies into Zombies, Gabriela featured the work of Carolyn Elya, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. The video has more than 9 million views and won a Jackson Wild Media Award in 2020, the equivalent of the Oscars® of wildlife filmmaking.

Big thanks to Gabriela and all the women scientists that we’ve worked with to make our Deep Look videos!