Brookfield Podcaster Marks Landmark Episode Of Award-Winning Show

BROOKFIELD, CT — Getting in early and playing the long game is not just good advice for playing the stock market, but hosting a successful podcast as well.

Kira Dineen began her podcast series, "DNA Today," during her senior year at Brookfield High School. Over a decade later, she's just delivered her 300th episode of the show, which has won the Best Science and Medicine category from the People's Choice Podcast Awards for three consecutive years (2020-2022).

She even numbers Kourtney Kardashian among her faithful fans.

Dineen, 29, said she knew she wanted to pursue a career in genetics as early as junior year at BHS. She set out to learn more about the field and get to know as many working professionals in it as possible.

"But they're not going to take a meeting with a high schooler, right? They're going to save that time for college students," she said.

At Brookfield High School, Dineen had begun a bioethics podcast as a means of documenting her independent study for a senior year course, and decided to use that as the bait.

"I figured if I invite them to be interviewed on a show, they're more likely to say 'yes' to me, and that's kind of what started happening. "

It was a lot of initiative — and a lot more work — for a 17-year-old just beginning to contemplate her life post-high school.

Those efforts have paid off in spades.

"My career, pretty much everything that I've accomplished, people I've been able to meet, jobs I've gotten, clients I've worked with — it all comes back to the show," she said.

Dineen picked up her first full-time job as a genetics counselor when a "DNA Today" fan — a doctor with a practice in Stamford — offered her a position. That job counseling pregnant women, and women who wanted to become pregnant, paid the bills for several years, while she burned the midnight oil behind a microphone.

To her delight, the success of her podcast eventually enabled Dineen to pare back her counseling work to just two days a week. Now with over 70 sponsors, including blue chip players like Johns Hopkins and Illumina, "DNA Today" has become her main source of income.

But the podcasting life, full or part-time, is not for anyone.

"We didn't make any money until we were seven years in," Dineen told Patch.

For those that can capture lightning in their bottles, it's a glorious time to be in the industry, with many podcasts inspiring TV shows.

Could there be cross-media stardom in Dineen's future? Brookfield's most famous podcaster says she keeps her eye warily on the prize, but reckons time is on her side.

"Being relatively young at 29, hopefully there's something in my future, even if I'm featured in a documentary or something as the expert, or whatever. I figure the sky's the limit with media. And I didn't think that 'DNA Today' would be my main source of income 12 years later, so you never know. I'm always up for whatever's out there."