Shaping Science with Nick Dirks

Alek Kemeny, a member of Anthropic's Beneficial Deployments team, was trained as a quantum physicist and has spent the past year focused on a novel question: What can AI models safely do in the physical world? In August 2026, he co-led the launch of Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard, a new open specification that lets AI models like Claude read from and operate real laboratory and manufa...

Alek Kemeny, a member of  Anthropic's Beneficial Deployments team, was trained as a quantumphysicist and has spent the past year focused on a novel question: What can AI models safely do in the physical world? In August 2026, he co-led the launch of Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard, a new open specification that lets AI models like Claude read from and operate real laboratory and manufa...

Dr. Seven Rasmussen is an astrobiologist, author, educator, and science communicator whose work explores one of humanity’s oldest questions: are we alone in the universe? Dr. Rasmussen studies how planets form, evolve, and potentially support life, while also bringing these ideas to wider audiences through her writing. Rasmussen’s recent book, ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Starships,’ uses the famous D...

Josh Lerner, a leading expert on venture capital, private equity, and innovation policy, is an economist and the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School. Over the past three decades, his research has shaped how governments, investors, and entrepreneurs understand the financing of innovation. Prof. Lerner’s work explores when markets succeed, when public policy fa...

Hans Peter Brondmo  is a technology entrepreneur, former Google Vice President, and a leading thinker on artificial intelligence, robotics, and the future of work. He has founded several startups and held positions at Nokia in Berlin, Apple in Tokyo, and at CERN in Geneva. At Google’s X — the “moonshot factory” — he founded and led the Everyday Robots project, an ambitious effort to build general-...

Peter Agre, MD , is a physician, molecular biologist, and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (2003) whose discovery of aquaporin water-channel proteins transformed our understanding of how water moves through cell membranes. He is also a passionate advocate of global health, malaria research and holds the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a strong believer in s...

Thomas Levenson is a historian of science and Professor of Science Writing at MIT. He has written several bestselling narrative histories covering topics from Isaac Newton’s unexpected career as a crime fighter to the 1720 South Sea Bubble, now recognized as one of the world's first financial crises. Levenson explores how scientific ideas emerge, collide with politics, and reshape society and...

Emily Eakin, senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, whose pieces have also been published in The New Yorker, Vogue, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and more. She recently published her first book, ‘The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory,’ which tells the improbable story of the prominent French philosophers that had profound and lasting influence in the 1980s and ’90s....

Diana Reiss is a cognitive psychologist and one of the world’s leading researchers on animal cognition and consciousness. Best known for her groundbreaking work demonstrating mirror self-recognition in dolphins – a discovery that challenged long-standing assumptions about human cognitive uniqueness, Reiss has spent decades studying how dolphins and other animals think, communicate, and understand...

Andrea Wulf is an internationally bestselling historian and author whose work has reshaped how we understand the relationship between science, nature, and culture. Across her work, Wulf brings to life the intellectual networks and ideas that have shaped modern understandings of the natural world, from Enlightenment science to Romantic philosophy. Her latest book, ‘The Traveler,’ is a sweeping biog...

David Spergel is a theoretical astrophysicist and professor emeritus of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. A renowned cosmologist, he helped lead NASA's landmark Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, which revolutionized our understanding of the universe, and later chaired NASA's independent study team on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. As president of the Simons Foun...

Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and a leading thinker on ethics, religion, and meaning in everyday life. His work explores how belief, morality, and material objects shape who we are and howmodern ideas of sincerity, freedom, and responsibility came to be. Through fieldwork in Indonesia and wide‑ranging theoreti...

Azra Raza, MD, is a world leading cancer physician scientist and Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, where she directs the Myelodysplastic Syndrome Center. For more than four decades, she has been at the forefront of research into blood cancers, with a particular focus on detecting cancer at its very earliest stages. She is also the author of the acclaimed book The First Cell, which chal...

 Jonathan Metlz, MD, PhD, joins Nick Dirks to discuss his educational journey that combined the sciences with the humanities, firearm culture in the American Heartland, and the growing skepticism of institutional expertise. Prof. Metzl is a physician, psychiatrist, sociologist and public intellectual whose scholarship and commentary explore the intersections of health, race, identity and violence...

 Sebastian Mallaby,  author, journalist, and the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins Nick Dirks to discuss his latest book, The Infinity Machine , a fascinating chronicle of Demis Hassabis and the rise of DeepMind.  Also read from Sebastian Mallaby:  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/opinion/china-ai-america-chipmakers.html 00:00 In...

Steven Johnson joins Nick Dirks to discuss his journey from majoring in semiotics to becoming a bestselling author widely known for his perspectives on the intersection of science, technology, and society. The author of 13 acclaimed books including  Everything Bad Is Good for You , and  Where Good Ideas Come From   – and the host of the Emmy-winning PBS/BBC series  How We Got to Now , Steven Johns...

Britney Schmidt, PhD, joins Nick Dirks to discuss what we can learn from earth’s harshest environments, what the Thwaites Glacier tells us about rising sea levels, and why she believes Europa deserves more attention than Mars. Dr. Britney Schmidt is a planetary scientist, glaciologist, and astrobiologist whose groundbreaking work explores the hidden oceans beneath ice worlds – both on Earth and be...

Ron Gonen, MBA, joins Nick Dirks to discuss the environmental benefits of the circular economy, how the military industrial complex fueled the rise of our consumer economy, and why focusing on taxes can be effective when convincing skeptics to be more environmentally conscious. Ron Gonen is an environmental entrepreneur, investor, and author who is the Founder and CEO of Closed Loop Partners, a Ne...

Neurobiologist Stuart Firestein and playwright Jake Brasch join Nick Dirks on Shaping Science to discuss “The Reservoir,” a new Off-Broadway play that touches on universal themes, including aging, family, recovery and memory.   Stuart Firestein, PhD, a neurobiologist at Columbia University, also advises the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project, who ar...

Chandrika Tandon joins Nick Dirks on Shaping Science to discuss how perseverance and determination have fueled every aspect of her life, from her childhood in India, to working her way up to the top of the corporate world as a partner at McKinsey, to becoming a visionary philanthropist with a passion for music and education. The Chair the Board of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, which bears...

Ian Bogost, PhD, joins Nick Dirks in the tenth episode of Shaping Science to discuss the intersection of philosophy and technology, how gaming compares to previous moral panics, and new approaches to integrating AI in higher education. Prof. Bogost is a philosopher, author, game designer, and professor whose work explores the intersection of technology, media, and culture. He is currently Barbara...

Nicolas Langlitz, MD, PhD, joins Nick Dirks in the ninth episode of Shaping Science to discuss medical anthropology, the anti-psychiatric movement, and the therapeutic potential of LSD. Prof. Langlitz is a German-born anthropologist and historian of science, currently serving as a Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research., where he also oversees the Psychedelic Humanities La...

Laura Spinney joins Nick Dirks in the latest episode of Shaping Science to discuss how the “Spanish” flu got its name, why societies change over time, and the role of genetics and DNA in understanding language origins in Eastern Europe. Laura Spinney is a science journalist and author whose work explores how science, society, and culture intersect. She is best known for her international bestselle...

Agustín Fuentes, PhD , joins Nick Dirks in the latest episode of Shaping Science to discuss his boundary-crossing work in anthropology; humanist questions around the power of belief; and the biological character of gender and sex. Dr. Fuentes is a biological anthropologist whose research challenges entrenched ideas about what it means to be human. A professor at Princeton University, he is known f...

Angus Fletcher, PhD, joins Nick Dirks in the latest episode of Shaping Science to discuss how the humanities inform the sciences, the role of neurons as action initiators, and why he thinks artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hoax. With degrees from the University of Michigan and Yale University, he is currently a professor of story science at Ohio State University’s Project Narrative. Trai...