Big Brains

University of Chicago alumnus Bill Browder’s story sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller—except it’s all true. He just wanted to be a businessman, but his experience as a foreign investor in Russia would push him to become an international activist. Today, Browder, AB’85, travels the globe trying to convince countries to adopt a law called the Magnitsky Act, which he says is the future of h...

University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales often says that only an immigrant like himself can really appreciate American capitalism. In his native Italy, Zingales says what you know and what you do are far less important that who you know and what you do for them.  But in the last decade, Zingales says the United States has started to look more and more like the country he left. Now, he’s tryi...

In October of 2019, Google announced their supercomputer had reached quantum supremacy. With that announcement, and as we take a short break for the holidays, we thought we should replay a prior Big Brains episode for you with David Awschalom, one of the world's leading quantum scientists. Awschalom is turning what was once in the realm of science fiction into reality—which could offer revolutiona...

Every election year, poll after poll tries to predict where millennials stand politically. As we head into 2020, we'd like to replay this episode with Prof. Cathy Cohen who says some of our assumptions about what issues matter to young people are all wrong. Cohen’s innovative survey of millennials, GenForward, is a first of its kind. By oversampling young people of color, they investigate differen...

It’s a simple question to ask, but seems impossible to answer: What causes one nation to succeed and another to fail? What exactly are the origins of global inequality? There are few people who have spent more time trying to answer this question than Prof. James Robinson. Robinson’ first book, Why Nations Fail, was an international best-seller. It laid out in clear and stark terms what the origins...

Since the beginning of human history, we’ve looked up at the stars and wondered: Are we alone? No other generation has been able to find an answer, but David Charbonneau thinks we may be the first. He’s an astronomer at Harvard University and a recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Chicago this year. Charbonneau has made it his life’s goal to search the stars for habitable planets...

For most Americans, the driving force in their personal and public life is a desire to attain the “good life”. But what if our attachment to that desire is the very thing holding us back? Lauren Berlant is a theorist and English professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Cruel Optimism” a book about when you're attached to forms of life that fundamentally get in the way of the attac...

In the last decade, there has been a mass migration of people into urban areas across the globe. This rapid urbanization has been increasingly unsustainable for our cities and it’s projected to get worse in the next decade.  University of Chicago scholar Luis Bettencourt is tackling this global crisis by researching the underlying processes that dictate our cities. If you can understand the number...

If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Most people say they’d want to read minds. But Prof. Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business says you already have that power: You just need to use it. Epley’s research has focused on the ways our minds understand, or fail to understand each other. Now, he’s expanded that research to look into why talking to strangers...

It’s been a historic week, with news that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has officially opened an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. There’s no better expert to examine the recent events in Washington than Prof. William Howell , one of the leading scholars on the power of the American presidency. In this episode, he discusses the historical context of impeachment, the Republicans’ respon...

The looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad became one of the defining moments of the second Iraq War. Christopher Woods, the director of the Oriental Institute, one of the world’s foremost research centers on the ancient Near East, says that in moments like these when archaeology and politics intersect, archaeology becomes a kind of statecraft. Since the Gulf Wars, archaeologists have b...

One of the incredible perks of making a podcast at a place like the University of Chicago is the opportunity to feature some of the incredible guests who speak on our campus.  This week, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was here for a conversation hosted by Katherine Baicker, dean of the Harris School of Public Policy. On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, please enjoy Justice Ginsbu...

Is it possible that having lunch with your friends is just as important in keeping you alive as exercising? That’s what University of Chicago professor Linda Waite is arguing. Her first of its kind research into social well-being has provided key insights into how our social lives affect our physical health. The data from Waite’s studies have changed our understanding of what it means to be health...

If you’ve played Candy Crush, flown on United Airlines, or taken an Uber or Lyft, you’ve been in one of Prof. John List’s experiments without even knowing it. List has revolutionized economics research through his pioneering use of field experiments. A field experiment is conducted in the real world instead of in a lab, testing theories on people in their day-to-day lives. List’s experiments have...

We're taking a summer break during July, but we'll be back in August with new episodes telling the stories of leading research with some of the world's greatest minds. During the break, we'll be bringing you updated versions of prior episodes. The revelation for historian Kathleen Belew came while researching a 1979 anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina that turned deadly when five...

Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin spent six years in the Arctic searching for a fossil that could be a missing link between sea and land animals. Shubin shares the story behind his discovery of Tiktaalik, what it has meant for the understanding of human evolution, and how it has impacted the future of genetic research. Neil Shubin episode show notes and full transcript Read more about Shubin's di...

We're taking a summer break during July, but we'll be back in August with new episodes telling the stories of leading research with some of the world's greatest minds. During the break, we'll be bringing you updated versions of prior episodes. This week, we have a guest episode of the No Jargon podcast. The show is produced by the Scholars Strategy Network and features interviews with America's to...

If you want to better understand how Trump has forever changed the American presidency, the history of impeachment, or how to fix the dysfunction in our government, it’s best to go to an expert. Prof.  William Howell  is one of the leading scholars on presidential powers. On this episode, Howell explains how Trump’s era fits into the larger narratives of the presidency, how the debate around impea...

UChicago economist Raghuram Rajan became infamous for predicting the 2008 financial collapse three years before it happened. Rajan says that there are three pillars in our society: the state, the markets and the community. In his new book, he traces the history of how the state and markets have grown, while the community has weakened. He says these pillars need to be brought back to an equilibrium...

The “birthers”, “Pizzagate”, anti-vaxxers. Since the election of Donald Trump, it’s seemed that belief in conspiracy theories is on the rise. At the same time, our polarization is worse than ever. People can hardly even maintain a conversation across political or cultural lines. Could the underlying force driving conspiracy theories also be the same one that’s dividing our country? University of C...

Doctor Valluvan Jeevanandam says that transplantation is a “spiritual journey.” One person’s tragic loss leads to the another’s second chance at life. But not all transplants are the same. In 2018, patients Daru Smith and Sarah McPharlin were both waiting on the donor list for not one but three organs. They were to be only the 16th and 17th triple organ transplant patients. But a shocking coincide...

When dinosaur hunter and paleontologist Paul Sereno discovered an ancient mass gravesite in the sands of the Sahara, he knew he had to excavate and save that history and heritage. Sereno has always said paleontology and archeology are adventures with a purpose. If the discovery of that ancient society is his greatest adventures, his new project to bring it back to the people it belongs to could be...

Since the late 1800s, if you were serious about studying biology you went to the Marine Biological Laboratory. The discoveries made there have led to world-changing applications in biology, medicine and neurology. The newly appointed MBL director, Nipam Patel, knows a lot about studying organisms. As one of the world’s leading evolutionary and developmental biologists, his work has help us better...

The development of artificial intelligence has begun to feel inevitable and promising. But University of Chicago computer scientist, Ben Zhao, has spent much of his career testing how the security of these systems can break down. Zhao’s study involving Yelp reviews generated by A.I. show how these system could be used to distort our perceptions of reality, especially in this era of fake news. And...

In her book Ghosts In The Schoolyard , University of Chicago scholar Eve Ewing asks a central question about the 2013 mass closings of Chicago Public Schools: If the schools were so bad, why did people fight so hard to save them? Her investigation is a deep and nuanced investigation of the public school system that reveals important lessons about how we conduct education policy. The conclusions fr...