This month we have the honor of celebrating the one‑year anniversary of the VALIANT Discovery Center. In our firstyear VALIANT has brought together an amazing community of researchers, scholars, scientists—borrowing the language of Babylon 5—dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. With every issue of this newsletter I get to review the remarkable progress our members are making through scientific publication, rigorous peer review, and careful discovery. Those efforts are already reflected in more than 100,000 citations—evidence of daily inspiration and innovation as much as formal accolades.

I spent a few days this month at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine meeting, the very first conference I ever attended as a new doctoral student. It was electrifying to reconnect with imaging physics: bright young minds programming novel pulse sequences on incredibly high‑field magnets, tuned with state‑of‑the‑art electronics and AI‑based signal processing. I came home with more ideas than we can possibly explore in the next several years.

Yet titles that resonate in a convention center full of physicists, engineers, and clinicians often feel opaque outside that hall (for example, even our own Michael Kim’s award winning “White Matter Microstructure and Macrostructure Brain Charts across the Human Lifespan: 23,971 Participants from 25 Studies” is quite imposing). These conferences are, in many ways, the field talking to itself—an act of scientific self‑discovery. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, science is a candle in the dark, but only if we let its light reach beyond our own circles. The necessity of these fundamental, transformative efforts can look mysterious to the wider community that ultimately supports them.

In discussions with our steering committee, we decided to launch a pilot outreach program to shed light on the importance of these nuanced, highly technical advances. Communicating across technical, clinical, and general audiences is hard; our training focuses on depth of knowledge, not cross‑field storytelling. But we are an AI center, and one thing AI does brilliantly is translation—of language and of ideas. My phone can already flip spoken English into dozens of languages at the press of a button; why not use the same power to translate our domain‑specific innovations for a broader public?

After running the idea past my teenager—who pronounced, “seems like a cool science podcast”—we are rolling out VALIANT Pulse, a summer series of short, AI‑assisted, human‑curated episodes that capture why our work matters. The inaugural episode, produced with Google Gemini and hosted by our own Dr. Nancy Newlin, is now live wherever podcasts are found. I welcome your feedback, your ideas for guest episodes, and your special‑episode pitches.

As we enter year two, I remain committed to fostering collaboration, advancing rigorous science, and sharing our collective insights with the world. Thank you for continuing on this journey with me—together, as dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers—toward ever‑brighter horizons of joyful discovery.

With gratitude and excitement,