*Bonus Episode* Gemma moderated a panel at SXSW on building an ecosystem for science startups with Ana Florescu of Science Practice , Harry Destecroix of UnitDx , and Dominic Falcao of Deep Science Ventures .
This episode we spoke to Elsa Sotiriadis , the Chief Futurist and Program Director of Rebel Bio . Rebel Bio is the world's first life science accelerator, based initially out of Cork, they have worked with startups tackling synthetic meat, algae derived materials, and drug repurposing using AI. They have recently brought in their first cohort to their 2nd home in London, where they will work out of the new White City Incubator. We were keen to break down the different science startup ecosystems ...
We spoke to Hemai Parthasarathy, the Scientific Director of Breakout Labs , a fund for early stage deep tech startups to get their research out of the lab. Hemai started out as a neuroscientist at MIT, and moved from academia to the field of publishing as the North American Editor of Nature and went on to be one of the founding editors of PLOS, building PLOS Biology and PLOS One. So as you can imagine we were keen to get Hemai's perspective on a whole host of subjects straddling academia and ind...
This episode we speak to Philip Hemme, the founder and CEO of Labiotech , the leading media organisation covering European biotech. We talk about their rapid growth as a startup, the current state of biotech media, their internationally diverse team, and the benefits of 'open science' to biotech startups.
This episode we chatted to Erin Kim the Communications Director at New Harvest , a non-profit research institute focussed on making cellular agriculture a reality. We talk about the the current state of lab grown meat, the importance of effective science communication in a field prone to hype or hysteria, and the community New Harvest are building through their events.
This episode features Julian Huppert , former Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, and now Director of the Intellectual Forum at Jesus College Cambridge. We chat about Julian's journey from academia to the House of Commons where he was recognised as the only scientist, a moniker that Julian was keen to not let define and confine his policy goals. We wanted to get his insight into the general state of scientific understanding in parliament, and how scientists can better engage politicians with topi...
This episode we chatted to Bethan Wolfenden , the co-founder of Bento Bioworks , a biotech startup that has created a 'laptop size laboratory'. This kit allows the user to perform simple DNA analysis and dramatically reduces the cost of the components you'd need to analyse samples, thus lowering the barrier to entry for molecular biology. This episode is a very candid discussion about founding the company, as we cover the difficult decision to move on from a PhD to develop the company and the ch...
In this episode we chatted to Christine Gould , founder and CEO of the Thought for Food Foundation. Their annual conference, startup challenge and active community centres around the science and tech working to ensure we have enough food to feed the world. With Christine, we talked about how to bring together diverse groups of people - startups, scientists, designers, policy makers, corporates and, in particular, young people, to work towards solutions. She explained how the TFF annual summit is...
In this episode we chatted to Kristin Ellis , the Scientific Development Lead at OpenTrons , about all things science. OpenTrons is a company that builds affordable open-source lab robots, that remove the need to perform tedious manual pipetting tasks, to free up valuable time for researchers. We touched on the importance of good science communication and the unfair stigma that often impacts researchers that are keen to involve and talk to the public, and the true value of encouraging that "...a...
This episode Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media joins us in a far reaching conversation spanning the whole science ecosystem. From the communication of science, to liberating knowledge generated by research from the confines of the static PDF, to the mutual learning experience of colliding technologists and academics, Tim has been regarded as a thought leader in Silicon Valley over the past few decades, popularising the terms open source and web 2.0. So we were interested to see how...
We speak to Chad Rigetti, CEO of quantum computing startup Rigetti Computing . We dive deep into the challenges that face deep tech startups, the core debates within quantum computing, and what it's like to compete with the likes of Google in this brave new world of the future computer. We wanted to get an insight into what's actually going on behind the scenes in the burgeoning quantum computing industry. We were also intrigued as to how a startup is able to play competitively in a space that r...
This episode was recorded in the bowels of Sussex University when we met up with Tom Baden a Neuroscientist interested in how the visual system processes information. Our motivation for chatting to Tom was a brilliant project called the FlyPi that he developed, along with Andre Chagas another Neuroscientist who joined us via the magic of Skype. FlyPi is a great representation of a seemingly growing phenomena of DIY tools within the labs - you can read the paper for the specs, but in short it's a...
This episode we speak to Zach Mueller , an Amazon Data Scientist and co-Founder of Sound.Bio , Seattle's first DIY Biohackspace. We wanted to hear about how they aim to build a community around biology, the challenges of setting up the lab, and the efforts they go to to educate Seattleites in modern biotech. Zach comes to biology with little experience, in fact he was drawn to the field after listening to a podcast that spoke about IGEM , the synthetic biology competition for undergraduate teams...
In this episode we spoke to Jackie Hunter, CEO of Benevolent Bio, a company that utilises machine learning and AI to find previously overlooked drug candidates within the research literature. Jackie was previously Chief Executive of the BBSRC and comes into the AI space with a wealth of experience in industrial drug discovery.
In this episode we spoke to Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience. Twist has revolutionised the process of synthesising DNA which is used in applications spanning drug discovery to optimising crop production and beyond.
Our latest episode is with Tom Zeller Jr the Editor in Chief of Undark (formerly at the New York Times). Undark was set up as way of applying hard hitting investigative journalism to the intersection of science and society. Supported by the Knight Foundation, Undark is unbeholden to advertisers which allows them to tackle the cases they want to. We think their description blows anything we could say out of the water... "" The name Undark arises from a murky, century-old mingling of science and c...
This episode we chatted to Hugh Forrest , the newly minted Chief Programming Officer of South by South West (SXSW). This role puts Hugh in charge of one of the most dynamic and diverse conferences around, covering around 1300 panels & talks, approximately 2000 bands, and roughly 300 films (many making their premieres at SXSW). Hugh's been at SXSW since the "stone ages" of the conference (way back in 1989...) - in fact he was the first paid employee! We were keen to see how SXSW has evolved over ...
This week we chatted to Chris Hartgerink a PhD metascientist (the science of science) and open access advocate, whose core focus is on data fraud. Chris was recently featured in this Guardian piece - he ruffled plenty of feathers when he modified and implemented Statcheck , a tool developed by fellow metascientist Michèle Nuijten that scans tens of thousands of research papers and analyses the credibility of the findings. We talk data fabrication, the unfortunate resistance to skepticism in scie...
This episode we chatted to Michael Eisen ( @mbeisen ), a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Michael is a core advocate of the Open Science movement Co-Founding the Public Library of Science ( PLOS ). He is also, as of this April, an aspiring Senator (you can follow his alter-ego at @SenatorPhD ). We spoke about bringing science down from its ivory tower, the merits of being a politically engaged scientist, and how the issue of diversity in scie...
We were joined by Alok Tayi, CEO and Co-Founder of TetraScience , a Y Combinator alumni company that utilises IoT to transform how research is done. We talk about the current state of 'disconnected' research, being open to innovation within science, and how tech can give researchers their weekend back.
We spoke to Ryan Bethencourt , the Program Director and Venture Partner at IndieBio - the world's largest seed biotech accelerator - about building the science startups of tomorrow, and the role of risk in the medical research process.
Featuring Dr Ceri Brenner an Application Development Physicist at the STFC. Based out of the Harwell Campus, Ceri focuses on how to spin out technology related to laser her laser science. We spoke about the importance of flexibility in science, and language barriers between different areas of research and between research and the business sector.
Featuring Ross Mounce, Cambridge Post-Doc and Editor at RIO Journal a platform that publishes all outputs of the research cycle, including: project proposals, data, methods, workflows, software. We spoke to Ross about the distressing state of the academic publishing industry, from the costs of making research open, to the archaic review processes.
Featuring Conrad Wolfram, Strategic and International Director of Wolfram Alpha, and founder of Computer Based Math. We spoke about a need to shift math education towards problem solving and away from pure computation, and what's standing in the way of educational reform.
We speak to Mark Levinson, Director of Particle Fever , about telling the human stories behind the Higgs Boson discovery, making the complex beautifully compelling, and what's next for the Particle Physicist turned Film-Maker......
