Night Science
Episodes
84 | Every scientist is an artist – Lois Hetland
13 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Lois Hetland, chair of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art, joins us to ask: what do artists and scientists truly share? We ex...
83 | How science is secretly driven by analogy – Melanie Mitchell
16 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a leading thinker on artificial intelligence, analogy, and abstraction. She reflects on ...
82 | On being alone together – Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues co-direct the Laboratory of Morphogenesis at Rockefeller University. They are also married. Together, we reflect on wha...
81 | How to find your way by getting lost – Marina Dubova
12 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It’s surprising that for centuries, scientists have left the study of how to do science largely to non-scientists. Not anymore – thanks to the you...
Why greatness cannot be planned with Kenneth Stanley
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ken Stanley is a highly regarded researcher in machine learning and artificial intelligence. After leaving his professorship at the University of Cent...
Maria Leptin and creativity in grant writing
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC, the European Research Council, and Professor of genetics at the University of Cologne. In this episode, Mari...
78 | Stephen Nachmanovitch on free play and chivalry
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen Nachmanovitch is a musician celebrated for his free improvisations, and an educator whose books Free Play and The Art of Is have become classi...
77 | Akiko Iwasaki and the art of creativity maintenance
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale professor and Howard Hughes Investigator, was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2024. Together, we r...
76 | Can Google’s Co-scientist project give scientists superpowers?
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
To answer this question, we speak with Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking AI co-scientist p...
75 | Eve Marder and how Recipe Science ruins creativity
26 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Eve Marder is a pioneering neuroscientist at Brandeis University. Drawing on decades of work with a small neural circuit in lobsters, she de...
74 | Martin Schwartz and the importance of stupidity in science
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Martin Schwartz, a professor at Yale, is known for his work on integrins and his influential essay “The importance of stupidity in scientific resear...
73 | Ethan Mollick and a million Einsteins in a server
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With Ethan Mollick, professor at Wharton and author of the bestselling “Co-Intelligence”, we explore how generative AI tools like ChatGPT can enha...
72 | David Baker and the lab's communal brain
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David Baker, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for designing novel proteins with AI, is a professor at the University of Washington. I...
71 | Victor Ambros and the unique ways we perceive wonder
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Victor Ambros, newly awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of microRNA, is a developmental biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical Sc...
70 | Meghan O’Rourke on being the artist and their caretaker
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Meghan O'Rourke, acclaimed author of The Invisible Kingdom, poet, and Yale professor, joins us to explore the parallels between creative writing ...
69 | Keith Yamamoto and the freedom to fail
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Keith Yamamoto, professor and science policy leader at UCSF, discusses with us how modern science became trapped in a system that discourages creative...
68 | Peter Godfrey-Smith and middle class science
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peter Godfrey-Smith, a Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, explores with us the differences between creativity in scie...
67 | A hypothesis is a liability
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Itai and Martin delve into the interplay between hypothesis-driven and exploratory research, drawing on insights from past guests of ...
66 | Michael Fischbach and the scientific decision tree
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Stanford professor Michael Fischbach discusses insights from his course on how to choose meaningful research problems. Highlights inc...
65 | James Kaufman and the art of creativity maintenance
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
James Kaufman, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut, discusses the psychological underpinnings of creative thinking wi...
64 | Robert Weinberg and the perils of being a Fachidiot
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
MIT's Bob Weinberg is perhaps the world's most prominent cancer researcher. In this episode, Bob emphasizes that true innovation often comes...
63 | Manu Prakash and how the discovery changes you
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Manu Prakash is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, asking biological questions with insights from physics. His most widely known co...
62 | Dianne Newman and the visceral and intentional sides of science
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dianne Newman – a molecular microbiologist at CalTech – is a professor both in Biology and Geology. In this episode, she encourages young scientis...
61 | Tina Seelig on what to do with a really bad idea
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tina Seelig is Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars at Stanford University. She is widely known for teaching creativity courses and work...
60 | Venki Ramakrishnan and the secrets of doing science over tea
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 Molec...
59 | Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv and the point of creative frustration
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 c...
58 | Guy Yanai on Pentimenti
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
57 | George Church and shooting for the stars
29 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineeri...
56 | Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz lights a candle for science
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 wor...
55 | Isaac Newton and a new kind of science
01 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Night Science – coming up with novel ways to interpret the physical world – is as old as philosophy. In contrast, Day Science – empirical eviden...
54 | Bo Xia and a tale of tails
28 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 inj...
53 | Todd Golub and bottom-up creativity
26 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Prof. Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he arg...
52 | Sean B. Carroll – he told some good stories
12 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
51 | Nigel Goldenfeld and the jazz of impossible problems
29 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks w...
50 | It takes two to think
15 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ...
49 | Rich White on living on the edge cases
08 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
48 | Carolyn Bertozzi and a long game called science
25 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 p...
47 | Stephen Quake and the Creative Network
11 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen Quake is a Stanford University professor and the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Among his many inventions are DNA se...
46 | John Mattick and doing what your mother taught you
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
45 | Peter Ratcliffe on being the Master of Daydreams
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Peter J. Ratcliffe shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oxygen sensing in animal cells. He directs research institute...
44 | Christina Curtis and keeping the faith in the process
30 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Christina Curtis is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University’s Cancer Institut...
43 | Daniel Dennett’s intuition pumps
16 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Dennett, Professor at Tufts University, may be the most important living philosopher, tackling the biggest questions around: what is consciousn...
42 | Howard Stone on how to tilt your head for discovery
25 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Howard Stone is a Professor of Engineering at Princeton. His research explores how fluid dynamics can help to understand diverse systems, from bacteri...
41 | Prisca Liberali and the junkies of discovery
10 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Prisca Liberali is a senior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland. In this episode, Prisca tells us ...
40 | Tom Mullaney & Chris Rea on giving thanks to bias
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tom Mullaney is a Professor of History at Stanford University and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and Chris Rea ...
39 | Bonnie Bassler and living on the edge in a nerdy kind of way
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bonnie Bassler is the Chair of the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton. In this episode, Bonnie talks about her passion for scientific inquiry, ...
38 | Yukiko Yamashita, the queen of analogies
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Yukiko Yamashita is a biology professor at MIT and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Yukiko’s research is amazingly broad, per...
37 | Stephen Wolfram is the Worldly Scientist
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Can you think of another big company CEO that does basic science? Stephen Wolfram is the CEO of Wolfram Research – the company that developed Mathem...
36 | Laurence Hurst and the slime mold model of discovery
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Laurence Hurst is a professor of Evolutionary Genetics and the founding Director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at The University of Bath. Martin ...
35 | Edith Heard and the feeling for the system
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Edith Heard is a Professor at the Collège de France and the Director General of Europe’s “CERN for biologists”, the European Molecular Biology ...
34 | Ewan Birney and the battle scars of discovery
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ewan Birney is the deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) and co-director of the European Bioinformatics Institute. In...
33 | Paola Arlotta and science as a walk in the dark woods
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Paola Arlotta is a developmental neurobiologist and a professor at Harvard. She studies how the most complex organ in the human body (in the world? in...
32 | Marty Martin and Art Woods on science podcasting
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this special, we talk about podcasting with the two hosts of the Big Biology Podcast (https://www.bigbiology.org), Marty Martin – professor of di...
31 | Alfred Russel Wallace and night science by candlelight
01 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What was the creative process of Alfred Russel Wallace? In this séance, we channel the legendary self-taught evolutionary biologist, founder of the f...
30 | Zak Kohane and the abstraction of data
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Isaac (Zak) Kohane is the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. In this episode, Zak talks with us about how me...
29 | Jim Collins and the technology-free Friday
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jim Collins is Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. In this episode, he talks with us about his radical switch of fields in the early 2000’s,...
28 | Caroline Bartman and the flash(cards) of inspiration
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Caroline Bartman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Princeton’s Chemistry Department, and she is about to start her own lab at the University of Pennsylvan...
27 | Albert-László Barabási is not afraid to break things
22 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Albert-László Barabási is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University in Boston. In this episode, he tells us how he established the field...
26 | Stuart Firestein on artful ignorance, failure, and neglect
02 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Doing science reminds Stuart Firestein of an old saying: “It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat....
25 | Galit Lahav and the Night Science Tuesday
10 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Galit Lahav is the Chair of the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School, where she creates an environment that is collaborative...
24 | Eric Topol on thinking big about AI in medicine
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Eric Topol is a cardiologist, scientist, and author. Many twitter users will know Eric from his voice-of-reason tweets related to the covid pandemic. ...
23 | Aviv Regev on how to be generous with your ideas
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Aviv Regev is what anyone would call a true science hero. She is not only a pioneer of single-cell genomics and systems biology, but also a great ment...
22 | Cassandra Extavour and the language of creativity
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cassandra Extavour is a Professor of developmental and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and she is an Investigator at the prestigious Howar...
21 | Daniel Kahneman and the sunk-cost fallacy
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics – as a psychologist. His fundamental work in behavioral economics revealed our cognitive biases, s...
20 | Peer Bork and the scientific candy shop
02 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Peer Bork is a legendary scientist, and these days he’s also the Director of Scientific Activities at the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) in H...
19 | Edward Tufte and the Thinking Eye
23 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Edward Tufte (ET) is widely-considered as the guru of data visualisation. He has taught the world about how data is to be communicated. He is best kno...
18 | Shafi Goldwasser and the good joke
18 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Shafi Goldwasser received the Turing Award – the “Nobel Prize of Computing” – in 2012. She needs no introduction to anyone working in computer...
17 | Uri Alon and our internal tuning fork
31 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Uri Alon, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is best known for his contributions to systems biology. But Uri is also famous f...
16 | Agnel Sfeir on science as an obsession
16 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Agnel Sfeir is a leading scientist in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who studies fundamental aspects of the biology of the ce...
15 | Nikolaus Rajewsky on how to think like a bacterium
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nikolaus Rajewsky is the founding director of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology. After studying Physics, he moved into systems biology,...
14 | Bill Martin on paying attention
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Bill Martin from Düsseldorf University is a leading evolutionary biologist, who has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of ...
13 | Steven Strogatz on ruthless simplification
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Steven Strogatz, one of the world’s foremost applied mathematicians, is a Professor at Cornell University. While biologists have evolution as a gu...
12 | Samantha Morris on building your own creative lineage
08 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Sam Morris from Washington University in St. Louis is elucidating how cells make developmental decisions as they navigate the space of cell ...
11 | Ruth Lehmann and the Saturday afternoon experiment
24 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How do world-class scientists make discoveries? “Observing and listening” says Professor Ruth Lehmann, the Director of MIT’s Whitehead Institute...
10 | Tom McLeish on the poetry of science
30 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How is science like art? In this episode, we talk about the similarities between the creative processes of science and art with Tom McLeish, a Fellow ...
9 | Ben Lehner on how to start your own scientific field
02 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Lehner is a Professor and Coordinator of the Systems Biology Programme at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. In this episode, Ben tal...
8 | Yana Bromberg on getting creative with machine learning
28 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Yana Bromberg is a Professor at Rutgers, where she teaches computers to speak the functional language of biological sequences. In this episode, she ta...
7 | Michael Strevens on how science really works
07 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to New Zealander Michael Strevens, who – after studying mathematics and computer science – became professor ...
6 | Harmit Malik’s dark alleys to discovery
24 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to Harmit Malik, Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and President of the Society for Molecu...
5 | Sarah Teichmann’s artist colony of scientists
17 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to Sarah Teichman, Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Director of Research in ...
4 | Oded Rechavi: biology’s Indiana Jones
07 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Itai and Martin talk to Oded Rechavi, Professor of Radical Science at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Having watched Indiana Jones as ...
3 | Arjun Raj’s bag of tricks
03 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Itai and Martin talk with Arjun Raj, Professor of Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania. Arjun understands the functioning of bi...
2 | Tzachi Pilpel on channeling other people’s minds for creativity
26 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, your hosts Itai and Martin talk with Tzachi Pilpel, Professor of Genome and Systems Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in I...
1 | Ellen Rothenberg: inhabiting the data
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, your hosts Itai and Martin talk with Ellen Rothenberg, a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Caltech, who always wanted to be Beeth...
Trailer
20 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this 5-minute trailer, your hosts Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explain what the Night Science Podcast is all about: conversations with great scien...