Today I’m speaking with Thomas Eiden. Thomas is a nuclear engineer and the founder and CEO of Atomic Alchemy. His startup manufactures radioisotopes, which are used in nuclear medicine—a specialized area of radiology that is critical for diagnosing and treating diseases like cancer. However, as Thomas has previously worked at several national labs,…

Today I’m speaking with Morgan Levine. Morgan is an assistant professor at Yale’s Pathology department and runs a lab that aims to discover both the mechanisms that drive aging and interventions to slow or reverse that process. The lab also develops tools to measure biological age, which we will get into in our discussion of epigenetic clocks. Agin…

Today I’m speaking with Olya Irzak. Olya runs Frost Methane, a company that develops technology to mitigate climate change. Together, her team invented a device to flare leaks to reduce methane emissions. As methane is responsible for 20% of global warming and is 28x more potent than CO2, Frost Methane aims to find and mitigate methane leaks in per…

Today I’m speaking with Tom Kalil. Tom is Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, where he leads projects to harness technology for social impact, improve science policy, and identify and pursue 21st-century moonshots. Tom has previously spent more than a decade in the White House, helping to design and launch national science and technology i…

Today I’m speaking with Tessa Alexanian. Tessa is focused on steering towards nice futures for biotechnology. To that end, she works at iGEM; creating incentives and programs that encourage synthetic biology development that is responsible, responsive, safe, and secure. She used to spend her days wrangling robots to do biological engineering but no…

Today I’m speaking with Mario Klingemann, widely known under his artist name Quasimondo. Mario is one of the pioneers in using machine learning in the arts and combines neural networks, code, and algorithms to produce works that are able to surprise and show almost autonomous creative behavior - and to me pose fascinating challenges to our understa…

Today I’m speaking to Shriya Nevatia. Shriya has spent the majority of her life in pursuit of creating meaningful communities - these days she does so at OnDeck. In our conversation, we discuss the difficulty in measuring success when it comes to human interaction, the role of groups in unlocking potential, the future of scouting for hidden talent,…

Today I’m speaking to José Luis Ricón. José is currently investigating how to make science great again. Beyond analyzing in which ways scientific mechanisms like peer-review and funding are broken, he tries to formulate and propose better alternatives to speed up scientific progress. Currently, he is focused on biology - specifically the field of l…

Today I am talking to Brian Heligman. Brian has spent the past years working on developing a new way of cheaply manufacturing batteries at scale - a problem of critical importance for the process of electrifying the world - while also allowing for the creation of brand new tech. This process has led him from his Ph.D. program to spinning out a star…

Today I’m speaking to Sonia Joseph. Sonia is a computational neuroscientist interested in the nature of intelligence - both in humans and machines. She currently works at Janelia, a different kind of research institute, that has been dubbed the Bell Labs of Biology. We cover everything from bottlenecks in the neuroscience space to new research para…