About Stephanie

Hi, and thanks for being here! I’m Stephanie Murphy, PhD. I’ve been a full time voice actor since 2013 and I love bringing my clients’ projects to life with my voice. I have so much fun doing this, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn something new from each and every script. If you haven’t done so already, please click on any of the video or audio links you see to get an idea of how my voice sounds.

People describe my voice as warm, feminine, “real,” and super easy on the ears. I can do a range of deliveries, but some of my best and most requested by my clients are: trustworthy, authentic & genuine, connecting with the listener, upbeat/excited, scientific, and even sexy and romantic. I have a general American accent that is described as neutral (without a regional accent,) but fits especially well with New England or California. I’m originally from Massachusetts, USA. I live in the greater Boston region and work on Eastern time.

If you’re ready to work with me now, please go ahead and contact me to reserve time in my schedule!

If you’re looking for information about my studio or recording equipment, please check out the studio page.

I offer several kinds of voiceover. For more information about my rates and policies, and to hear some more specific demos, please click on the section that corresponds to the type of voiceover you’re looking for.

Here are the services I most commonly perform for my clients:

• Medical, Scientific, and Technical voiceover.
  • Patient and physician education about conditions and treatments. Communicating how the body works in normal and disease states… in an easy to understand, trustworthy and comforting way. Pronunciation of words like “non-alcoholic steatohepatitis” or “exogenous pancrilipase” is a breeze!
• E-Learning, training, voiceover for online courses
  • Natural delivery, interesting and pleasant to listen to for hours on end. I can make a dry, mandatory training course, engaging! (And even, dare I say, fun!) I don’t skimp on details like making sure your files are exported and labeled correctly, either.
• Video Narrations – Explainer Videos, Product Videos, Demo Videos, and other video.
  • I can communicate your message in a real and genuine way, making a connection with the viewer (your customer!) Matching timing to an existing scratch track or video is no problem, either. Delivery within 2 working days.
• Audiobook narration
  • I have around 100 titles on Audible, and I am looking for successful authors who want to bring their book’s message or story to life in audio! Favorite genres include… Nonfiction: science, self help. Fiction: romance, especially romance featuring lesbian or queer women!
• Phone Greetings, Messages on Hold, IVR
  • Want your company’s phone greeting to stand out from the rest? Work with me! They won’t forget what they hear when they call you.
• Podcast Intro/Outro
  • Your show intro plays hundreds of times and sets the tone for your podcast. Knock your listeners’ socks off with an unforgettable one that supports your host’s uniqueness!
• Radio commercials, TV commercials
  • I bring a smile to the message, and nail even the tightest timings with ease.
• Interviewer, Host, or Commentator For Hire
  • My outstanding interviewer skills will make your guest shine. I know how to ask the right questions! Interview for hire is something I do on a very limited basis.
• Voiceover Coaching, Speaker, Event announcer, On Camera and In Person appearance
  • On rare occasions, I leave the studio…

In case you’re curious, here’s a little bit more about me…

I didn’t start out as an actor, or even a voice actor. I studied Biochemistry as an undergraduate and then went on to an MD/PhD program! I wanted to be a physician-scientist, doing medical research and hopefully even curing diseases. But during this long and winding career path, some big things changed for me.

I had started a podcast with one of my friends, as almost a joke. At the time, it was 2008, and podcasts were somewhat new. There were some very popular ones out there, and I listened to all of them that I could get my hands on. My favorites were the advice shows. You know, where people write in and ask the host about their relationship problems, family drama, friendship dilemmas, and awkward workplace situations? I loved those shows so much, and they were a great break from what I was doing as a med student, and then as a PhD grad student in Biochemistry. So, my friend and I started our own show.

What I didn’t know at the time was that this silly podcast would change my life.

Our first episode… OK, our first 10 episodes… can only be described as terrible! There was a refrigerator humming in the background, we had annoying verbal tics, we flubbed the questions, and we were pretty sure nobody was going to listen. But to our astonishment, people listened! We got feedback and listener questions, and pretty soon we started taking the podcast more seriously. We got interested in how we could improve our show. We learned how to make our audio sound better, improved our hosting skills, and took our best observations from our favorite pro podcasters and made them our own.

After a few years, I came to a scary but important realization: I was having more fun doing my silly podcast, than doing what I was doing all the rest of the day!

I filed that away in my brain for a while, sat on it, and in the meantime, listened to a lot of other podcasts and audiobooks. At that time in my life, I was working on my PhD. My work days were often filled with running experiments – making this buffer, pipetting that solution, labeling that tube. So, when I wasn’t thinking on a high level about my thesis project or reading the work of other scientists, I would listen to something in the background.

One of the audiobooks I listened to was The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I remember the exact moment when it felt like a bolt of lightening struck me, and I knew I had to change careers. I was opening the refrigerator in the lab to get out a reagent, and I heard Tim say something to the effect of, “Yes, it’s scary to make a career change. But isn’t it more scary to think that you could be stuck doing something you don’t really love, for the rest of your life?”

Yes Tim, that prospect did scare me! I knew I had to make a change, as crazy as it seemed and as much as I worried that people would judge me for it. After all, its not something you see often – a young physician-scientist in training, changing careers to become a voice actor? But we’ll get to that.

Actually, it turned out it wasn’t so strange after all. I found out later that less than 10% of PhD graduates in the life sciences go on to become professors. Crazy, right? That’s… kind of the idea when you go to grad school to pursue a PhD. And doctors. Don’t even get me started on that! (And you don’t have to take my word for it, either.) Many of them take out huge amounts of student loan debt to afford their medical education, right around a time in life where they want to start buying houses and having kids, and then they feel pressure to go into high paying specialties in order to have any hope of paying it off in their lifetime! And not to mention the stress. You want to talk about stress? Imagine working 120 hours in a week. Hell, imagine working 70 hours in a week, with at least one night where you are up all night working, and maybe even seeing some seriously heavy stuff, like hurt and sick people, and only having 6 or 7 hours to recover from that. There is no way you can process – and sleep – in that amount of time! So many med students who are married end up divorced… doctors are notoriously unhappy, and the burnout rates are astronomical. I made a mistake not realizing that (or, thinking I would be able to handle it just fine) when I went into medical school. Now, I was faced with what I would do about it.

I knew I wanted to change careers at that point when I heard Tim Ferriss’s words in that audiobook. But, I needed a plan. How was I going to make this work, and actually make a living doing something I liked? I mean, I wanted to do something I loved, but not if it meant that I would become a bum! I started thinking back to high school, around the time when adults started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. The first few times, I remember I said something like, “I want to go into communications” or “I want to be on the radio, or maybe theater.” Inevitably the adult I was talking to would cringe, blanch, and say something like, “oh you’ll never make it doing that! Why don’t you go into science? You’re good at science.” And I was good at science. So, I took their advice to heart.

The only problem was that I found out once I was well on my career path to becoming a physician-scientist that it wasn’t right for me.

So, back to the moment I realized I had to change careers. I started thinking, what could I do that will actually be a viable career for me? People listen to my podcast and tell me I have a nice voice all the time. But podcasting doesn’t pay the bills. However, I do love listening to audiobooks. Hey, maybe I could narrate audiobooks! And, I could incorporate my scientific background and medical knowledge by working on technical material.

That’s how my voiceover business was born.

I started transitioning after that. I took on some small voiceover jobs, which I got through my podcast. I volunteered to produce podcast intros for other shows that I liked. I jumped into the deep end with my first audiobook, an 16-hour tome which took me a year to complete, but ended up being released for free download and listened to quite a lot.

I did end up completing my PhD thesis in Biochemistry in 2013. However, I left medical school after having finished 2 years of medical education. I never looked back. I auditioned for voiceover jobs, got on Audible.com, started booking more voiceover projects immediately. I got the opportunity to work on a new podcast called Let’s Talk Bitcoin in 2013. I transitioned my previous podcast to a new name, Sex & Science Hour.

You may have heard me narrating one of my dozens of titles on Audible, or on national commercials for Beautyrest Mattresses, or even on YouTube on popular videos about escaping abusive relationships. Friends constantly tell me they hear my voice in surprising places, often when they least expect it.

Now, I am so happy that I believed in myself enough to change paths, even though it was scary at first. Welcome to what I have created as a voice actor!

Once again, if you’d like to work with me, you can contact me to reserve time in my schedule. I look forward to hearing from you!