PODCAST · science
Conversations with scientists
by Vivien Marx
Scientists talk about what they do and why they do what they do. Their motivations, their trajectory, their setbacks, their achievements. They offer their personal take on science, mentoring and the many aspects that have shaped their work and their lives. Hosted by journalist Vivien Marx. Her work has appeared in Nature journals, Science, The Economist, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal Europe and New Scientist among others. (Art: Justin Jackson)
Episodes
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AI agents and human scientists. A conversation with Dr. James Zou, Stanford University
AI agents and AI co-scientists are tools but also quite a bit more than that. They can fix software pipelines, analyze data mountains, develop hypotheses, debate. I asked Dr. James Zou of Stanford University all about how the world of science will change as AI agents gain more autonomy. He shared...
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Being an LGBTQ+ ally: a conversation with Lucas Lixinski
In STEM fields, being LGBTQ+ can be used against you. That's when having allies is especially important. Lucas Lixinski, a professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, in Australia talks honestly and openly about how hard being an ally can be, but also...
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ISSCR annual meeting: sneak peek of the sneak peek podcast
The annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is coming up July 8-11. If you are interested in stem cells, please tune into the sneak peek podcast of this meeting. And this is a sneak-peek of that sneak peek podcast. It's with the two program chairs of the…
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Sneak-peek of the 2026 annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research
The two program chairs of the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research talk about the meeting and some trends they see. They are Dr Fiona Doetsch from the University of Basel and Dr Nozomu Yachie from the University of British Columbia who has a lab at the University of...
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Sneak-peek of the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
Soon the annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience starts where 20,000 attendees will be talking all about their work on the brain. This is a sneak peek of that meeting. It's with Dr. John Morrison from the University of California at Davis and Dr. Emilie Marcus from UCLA, who is also the...
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Science summer: The MBL course 'Physio'
Summer courses are not exactly science and chilling but some courses do make it possible to combine the two a little. In this podcast Dr. Daria Ivanova, from the University of Geneva, Dr Sam Lord from University of California San Francisco and Dr. Will Ratcliff from Georgia Tech talk about the...
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Sneak-peek of the 2024 ISSCR annual meeting
This podcast was uploaded earlier this year but somehow it was deleted, sorry. So it's not quite a sneak-peek anymore...Whether or not you attended the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) or not, you might enjoy this conversation. It's with Dr. Amander...
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Sneak-peek of ASHG 2024
The annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) is about to start. Here's a sneak-peek of the meeting with Dr. Bruce Gelb who is the current president of ASHG, he is also a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. My co-host --Dr. Mike Fletcher senior…
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Sneak-peek of the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
Hear about some of the presentations at the upcoming 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. This sneak-peek that also is about some of the latest trends in neuroscience is with Yale University researcher Dr. Marina Picciotto, who is also the president of the Society for Neuroscience...
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A chat with NSF director Dr Sethuraman Panchanathan
This podcast is with Dr Sethuraman Panchanathan who directs the US National Science Foundation. He talks about his nickname, about AI and data science, about training AI models, about transparency, about the language of collaboration, competitiveness, about talent. He says: "I think what we need…
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Science while parenting, part 1
Can you be a scientist and parent? Of course. But it's not always easy. Dr. Ying Diao is at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in the chemical and biomolecular engineering department. She has a stack of awards, a lab and two children. She talks about her research, for instance a project...
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Here’s some dirt
This episode is about dirt or, phrased more scientifically, soil. It’s about soil health, soil biodiversity and ecology. It’s a conversation with Dr. Ciska Veen, soil and ecosystems researcher at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and Dr. Wim van der Putten, who heads terrestrial ecology at the...
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Persistence and success in science
Jean King, who is the dean of arts and sciences at WPI-Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, talks about what Nobel Laureate Katalin Karikó means to her and about persistence and success in science. (Art: J. Jackson; Music: Towers by sero, licensed from artlist.io)
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How to get big projects to soar: Anna Barker, Ellison Institute and former principal deputy director of the US National Cancer Institute
What good does it do to start a big research project? How do you get it to soar? Dr. Anna Barker has some answers about that from the past, the present and the future. She is chief strategy officer at the Ellison Institute, a think tank and research institute. Before that, she was the principal...
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Sneak-peek of SfN 2023
The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, a big conference in neuroscience, is about to start. This year, it's in Washington. And here is a sneak peek of the meeting for you. Along with editors at Springer Nature, I got the chance to ask a bit about the meeting before it starts shortly. It was…
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When housing insecurity gets in the way
Science and academia need diversity. Easier said than done because, for example, many students face housing insecurity, which keeps them from a focus on their studies. But that's something students are trying to change. I spoke with current and former students at UC Santa Cruz about this. In this...
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Lab languages
Labs and a lab's team members often speak many languages. Science is international. But in a lab environment languages can set people apart. I wrote a story about lab languages for Nature Methods here: https://rdcu.be/doPnv There's a blog post here:...
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Athlete-scientists Part 2
Dr. Liz Bradley, who is on the computer science faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder, is an athlete-scientist. She is a mathematician and a former Olympic rower. In this podcast you will hear about her, about sweeping and sculling, about rugby, why it's good to have a notebook, about…
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Science and the arts
Science and the arts have much to say to one another. This episode is a conversation between scientists and artists, between scientists who foster the arts through fellowships and residencies and artists active in science and people who live in both worlds: science and the arts. All this makes…
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Trees: A conversation with David Neale, University of California, Davis
A conversation with David Neale, professor emeritus of the University of California Davis and director of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. As a forester and scientist, he works on trees, also the genomics of trees to understand more about their longevity and adaptability to events such as...
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Athlete-scientists Part 1
University of California San Diego researcher Dr. Gene Yeo is an athlete-scientist. He has completed two Iron Man competitions, a number of half Iron Man competitions and both full and half marathons. He says: "On these long long runs and long bike rides, you know, you get the time to sort of…
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The push-pull of cells
Cells push things around and get pushed around, it's all in a day's work. Tracking this, such as by tracking actin and the cytoskeleton, takes microscopy and labels. Lifeact, for example, is a popular, widely used label. This conversation is with the Lifeact developers Dr. Michael Sixt from...
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Long-read sequencing: Steven Salzberg, Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Steven Salzberg is a Johns Hopkins University researcher and director of the Center for Computational Biology at Hopkins. I spoke with him about genomics, about long-read sequencing, about human biology and human diversity, about funding, technology choice, about complete and incomplete...
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Long-read sequencing: Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
When scientists want to know about genes, chances are they use instruments called sequencers. Some of them can generate long-reads, which helps with analyzing genomes. The method of the year according to Nature Methods is: long read-sequencing. For a story I chatted with scientists at companies…
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Long-read sequencing: Jonas Korlach, CSO of Pacific Biosciences
When scientists want to know about genes, chances are they use instruments called sequencers. There are quite a few companies that make sequencers. These instruments can give a read-out for example of a stretch of DNA or many stretches of DNA, even entire genomes and many genomes. The challenge…
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Invisible adversity
Dr Uri Manor is a researcher at the Salk Institute who studies the dynamics of cells and Aly Putnam is a PhD student at University of Massachusetts in Amherst. They work in different fields and they are at different career stages. What they have in common is that they both have faced and continue...
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Sneak-peek of SfN 2022
Recently, we had the chance to get a sneak-peek of the meeting with the Society for Neuroscience's current leadership and to play a nerdy game with them. They are: Dr. Gina Turrigiano, Brandeis University researcher and current President of the Society for Neuroscience, Dr. Robbie Greene of the...
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Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19, Episode 3
This is a podcast series with some of the people I spoke with for a story about the creative grit scientists in The Global South apply in the fight against COVID-19. They collaborate, they network, they get creative to get what they need: supplies and strength for their research. In the haste to...
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Speaking for the ocean
A conversation with sailor-scientist Romain Troublé Tara Ocean Foundation. He is executive director of the foundation devoted to the ocean and ocean research. And there's a connection to the French fashion house agnès b. You have perhaps heard of the gut microbiome, the many microbes in our gut...
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A model is a model is a ...
Models are important tools: they resemble, they mimic, they imitate something to a greater or lesser extent. How similar models are to the 'real thing' is usually a challenging issue. And it's a big issue with stem-cell derived models of the human embryo. These embryo models, models of the…
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Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19, Episode 2
I asked Dr. Leo Poon, who co-directs the Hong Kong University Pasteur Research Pole, if he has a fleet of private jets. He does not. But he wishes he did. He and his team have helped colleagues all over the world on COVID-19. He and his team developed a diagnostic assay quite soon after the…
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Ukraine and science, episode 2
How is the Russian invasion of Ukraine affecting scientists? Here is another episode on this with a conversation with Dr. Svitlana Dekina, a researcher at the A.V. Bogatsky Physico-Chemical Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Odessa, Ukraine. She has recently left Ukraine...
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Ukraine and science, episode 1
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is affecting scientists in many different ways. Here is a conversation with Dmytro Gospodaryov, a researcher in the department of biochemistry and biotechnology at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University in Ivano-Frankivsk, West Ukraine. I spoke to him...
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Creative grit: the Global South takes on COVID-19, Episode 1
Virologist Dr Marycelin Baba from the University of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria is passionate about her work on viruses, She runs a World Health Organization (WHO)-accredited and WHO-sponsored lab where the team has worked, for example, on polio. When COVID-19 emerged, she and her team were...
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The CRISPR Children, Episode 4
Around three years ago, three children were born with genomes edited before their birth. They are supposedly doing ok, sources tell me. But it's hard to know for sure. Germline-genome editing is not permissible in most countries, but it might one day be performed to avoid heritable diseases that...
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Predicting protein structure, episode 4
This episode is about AlphaFold and the impact it is having on junior scientists. I spoke with a group of them from different labs at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. I spoke with Dr Isabell Bludau, a postdoctoral fellow and computational biologist in the lab of Dr Matthias Mann, Dr....
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Predicting protein structure, episode 3
Biology and AI for predicting protein structure. This is a chat with conversation with some members of the Rost lab at the Technical University of Munich. Dr. Maria Littmann, postdoctoral fellow, and PhD students Konstantin Weissennow and Michael Heinzinger and Dr Burkhard Rost, principal...
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Predicting protein structure, episode 2
Protein structure prediction is the Nature Methods Method of the Year for 2021. Here is my feature on that. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01359-1 For the story, I chatted with Helen Berman, co-founder of the Protein Data Bank (PDB), which is home to experimentally determined…
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Predicting protein structure, episode 1
Proteins are twirly, curly, dynamic structures. Crucial for life, complicated to study. Predicting protein structure has been tough but it's now easier as AlphaFold enters the scene. That doesn't mean that AlphaFold has solved all challenges, of course. AlphaFold was developed by DeepMind...
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The CRISPR Children, Episode 3
To go along with my investigative story The CRISPR Children in Nature Biotechnology, I am producing a rolling series of podcasts. This episode is a chat with Dr. Eben Kirksey, an anthropologist at Deakin University, which has campuses in and near Melbourne, Australia. He has written a book called...
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The CRISPR Children, Episode 2
The CRISPR Children is a podcast series about the children whose genomes were edited before their birth in 2018. The podcasts accompany a story I did about these children in Nature Biotechnology by the same name. You can find the story here: https://rdcu.be/cB7Nx The children were born somewhere…
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The CRISPR children, Episode 1
The CRISPR Children is a series of podcasts about the children whose genomes were edited before their birth in 2018. The podcasts accompany a story I did about these children in Nature Biotechnology by the same name. You can find the story here: https://rdcu.be/cB7Nx The children were born...
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Ask the crab
Neuroscientists use models of the brain to study the brain. One of those model types: organoids. One way to get a conversation with a neuroscientist started badly is to ask them about the 'mini-brains' in the dish on their lab bench. It’s not that the blob in the dish doesn’t somehow look like a...
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Not lost in space Episode #2
This podcast is with Dr. Hongkui Zeng who directs the Allen Institute for Brain Science and Dr. Bolisjka Tasic who directs Molecular Genetics at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. It’s about how spatially resolved transcriptomics, a Nature Methods Method of the Year, can help to understand…
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Not lost in space Episode #1
This podcast is about two scientists, Dr. Patrik Ståhl and Dr. Fredrik Salmén, who are joint first authors of a paper that kickstarted a field. It's about finding work they did with colleagues to enable finding out where in tissue gene expressions is happening. It's called spatially resolved...
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Hello brittlestar
Marine echinoderms speak to developmental biologist Dr. Paola Oliveri at University College London for many reasons. Their evolution of a novel body plan is one of them. In a conversation she talks about teaching evolution, her training, her students and her love of science.
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Long-COVID Part 3: A chat with Terina Martinez
COVID-19 has been bad. Many, likely millions of people, who have survived their COVID-battle, face a difficult array of symptoms. Breathing problems, joint pain, heart palpitations, brain fog are a few of them. This is part 3 of a three-part podcast series on long-COVID. This episode is a...
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Long-COVID Part 1: A chat with Nadia Rosenthal
COVID-19 has been bad. Many, likely millions of people, who have survived their COVID-battle, face a difficult array of symptoms. Breathing problems, joint pain, heart palpitations, brain fog are a few of them. This is part 1 of a three-part podcast series on long-COVID. You can also find my…
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Long-COVID Part 2: A chat with Avi Nath
Around the world, COVID-19 has been awful. Many, likely millions of people, who have survived their COVID-battle, face a difficult array of symptoms. Breathing problems, joint pain, heart palpitations, brain fog are a few of them. This is part 2 of a three-part podcast series on long-COVID. This...
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A chat with with Na Ji
She's driven by curiosity. Na Ji is a physicist and neuroscientist at University of California, Berkeley. She develops ways to study the brain and she reads voraciously. She seeks to capture the signals that neurons pass to another with imaging and in multiple brain regions. She also teaches a...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Scientists talk about what they do and why they do what they do. Their motivations, their trajectory, their setbacks, their achievements. They offer their personal take on science, mentoring and the many aspects that have shaped their work and their lives. Hosted by journalist Vivien Marx. Her work has appeared in Nature journals, Science, The Economist, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal Europe and New Scientist among others. (Art: Justin Jackson)
HOSTED BY
Vivien Marx
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Conversations with scientists currently has 56 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Scientists talk about what they do and why they do what they do. Their motivations, their trajectory, their setbacks, their achievements. They offer their personal take on science, mentoring and the many aspects that have shaped their work and their lives. Hosted by journalist Vivien Marx. Her work...
How often does Conversations with scientists release new episodes?
Conversations with scientists has 56 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts Conversations with scientists?
Conversations with scientists is created and hosted by Vivien Marx.
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