In this episode, Itai and Martin delve into the interplay between hypothesis-driven and exploratory research, drawing on insights from past guests of the Night Science Podcast. They discuss how being focused on a single ...

In this episode, Stanford professor Michael Fischbach discusses insights from his course on how to choose meaningful research problems. Highlights include:- Invest time in problem selection: Spend more time upfront ...

James Kaufman, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut, discusses the psychological underpinnings of creative thinking with Itai & Martin. Together, we delve into the complex nature of creativity, ...

MIT's Bob Weinberg is perhaps the world's most prominent cancer researcher. In this episode, Bob emphasizes that true innovation often comes from blending ideas from different fields – a synthesis that transcends the boundaries of...

Manu Prakash is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, asking biological questions with insights from physics. His most widely known contribution is the FoldScope, a $1-microscope made from paper and a lens – 2 mill...

Dianne Newman – a molecular microbiologist at CalTech – is a professor both in Biology and Geology. In this episode, she encourages young scientists to pursue questions to which they have a visceral connection, rather than following popular tre...

Tina Seelig is Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars at Stanford University. She is widely known for teaching creativity courses and workshops with an entrepreneurial focus. In this episode, Tina emphasizes the import...

Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He runs a lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In this episode, Venki emphasizes the import...

Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv is a professor working on the immune system at Harvard’s Medical School. In this episode, we discuss with her how she teaches creativity in her course for PhD students. We explore the emotional roller coast...

Guy Yanai is a painter whose work is displayed in many public and private collections across the US, Europe, and Asia, including, for example, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His distinctive painting style blends modernist, abstract tendenci...

George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. A pioneer in the fields of personalized genomics and synthetic biology, he h...

Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz directs research labs at both CalTech in the US and the University of Cambridge in England. Magdalena is one of the world’s leading developmental biologists, who has been recognized by the 2023 Ogawa-Yamana...

Night Science – coming up with novel ways to interpret the physical world – is as old as philosophy. In contrast, Day Science – empirical evidence as the sole argument for truth – was invented only in the 1700s, championed by the ...

Bo Xia is a Junior Fellow at Harvard and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute. During his PhD with Itai, he suffered a painful tailbone injury that led to an obsession with this vestigial organ and its origins in...

Prof. Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he argues that creativity is the greatest hallmark of a successful scientist, and he t...

Sean Carroll is a world-renowned scientist, author, educator, and an Oscar-nominated film producer. Sean sees storytelling as the key to all he does. Similar to how musicians get inspiration by listening to other peo...

Nigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about how research is an art form, and how he tries to help graduate students ...

Despite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ideas stands out. It may sound trivial, yet it is as reliable as it is simple: talk to someone. ...

Rich White studies cancer as a professor at Oxford University. Rich is not only a brilliant physician-scientist but also a great friend of Itai Yanai, one of the two Night Science hosts. In this episode, Rich talks about how often...

Carolyn Bertozzi is a Professor at Stanford University. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In this episode we talk about how the process of science is unstructured, so you don’t know when and where the n...

Stephen Quake is a Stanford University professor and the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Among his many inventions are DNA sequencing methods for non-invasive prenatal testing. In this episode, Steve tells...

John Mattick is Professor of RNA Biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. For decades, he has been on a mission to show that the large portions of the human genome that many scientists consider useless...

Peter J. Ratcliffe shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oxygen sensing in animal cells. He directs research institutes in London and Oxford. In this episode, he reveals the interplay between dis...

Christina Curtis is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University’s Cancer Institute. Among her many achievements is the conception of the “Big Bang Theory” of tumor bio...

Daniel Dennett, Professor at Tufts University, may be the most important living philosopher, tackling the biggest questions around: what is consciousness, do we have free will, how does evolutionary adaptation occur? In this episo...