Child psychiatrist Victor Carrion has dedicated his career to studying and helping people deal with trauma, especially kids. He says that it is understandable that everyone in the family is dealing with some degree of stress due to COVID-19, and that’s okay. The key is to recognize and acknowledge the stress and deal with it head on. In this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything with host, bioengineer Russ Altman , Carrion explains that stress manifests differently at differ...
Apr 16, 2020•28 min•Ep. 112
When humans roamed as hunters and gatherers, the ability to retain calories likely determined who lived and who died in times of famine. Today, that evolutionary advantage may make us prone to diabetes. Join host Russ Altman , professor of bioengineering, and guest Sanjay Basu , a foremost expert in disease prevention, for a broad-ranging discussion of what works, what doesn’t and what new approaches—including an emphasis on community gardens and healthier diets—are on the horizon as society bat...
Apr 13, 2020•28 min•Ep. 32
Imagine being born with just half a heart. Alison Marsden does, pretty much every day. She is an associate professor of pediatrics specializing in cardiology and also of bioengineering. She works with children born with such dire defects. Fortunately for those kids, Marsden is also an expert in computational modeling of cardiovascular system and developer of SimVascular, software that helps surgeons simulate surgeries on the computer without risk to living patients. The software provides researc...
Apr 13, 2020•31 min•Ep. 60
Jayodita Sanghvi is director of data science at Grand Rounds, a startup that connects members to high-quality health care. Grace Tang is a data scientist at LinkedIn. Both are alumnae of Stanford bioengineering. While the connection between big data and bioengineering may not be readily apparent, Sanghvi and Tang say that the connection couldn’t be more clear or timely than right now when big data is now firmly entrenched in big business. From applications that help diagnose and guide people to ...
Apr 13, 2020•25 min
Stanford materials engineer William Chueh got interested in battery design as way to battle climate change. He looked across the energy landscape and understood that a future filled with renewable solar and wind energy will require more and better batteries to even out the troughs when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. Chueh says battery design has come a long way in the last 10 years. But sating the energy needs of a future filled with countless smartphones, laptops, electric c...
Apr 10, 2020•28 min•Ep. 105
Days after COVID-19 broke out in the United States, Russ Altman and colleagues at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) scrambled to organize a full-day online conference to replace the in-person meeting they were planning for spring 2020. Their topic: using AI to defeat the deadly new virus behind COVID-19 and, in particular, analyze how countries were responding; developing new ways of tracking and anticipating its spread; reshape the search for treatments and a...
Apr 09, 2020•28 min•Ep. 110
The co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence discusses how AI can reach its potential to enhance human capabilities and enrich human lives.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook
Apr 08, 2020•29 min•Ep. 108
An expert in bioinformatics describes how better information and modeling can help caregivers stay a step ahead of the new virus.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook
Apr 08, 2020•28 min•Ep. 109
New research explores how physical pushing and pulling between cells helps them differentiate into the myriad cell types in the body. Have you ever pondered how the cells in your hand knew to become a hand and not, say, a foot or a heart or an ear? Alex Dunn is a chemical engineer who thinks about such things a lot. He has always marveled at the way — from brain to blood to bone — the many cells that make up our bodies derive from just a single cell created when sperm meets egg. He says that pro...
Apr 03, 2020•28 min•Ep. 106
A marine scientist travels the world to understand whether and how the ocean will respond to climate change, overfishing and other challenges. Fiorenza “Fio” Micheli grew up on the Mediterranean Sea, where she fell in love with the ocean and made it the object of her scientific career. Now a marine ecologist and co-director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions, her research spans the spectrum of marine science. She has studied the overfishing of sharks and how their absence affects coral ree...
Mar 17, 2020•27 min•Ep. 107
A civil engineer explains how new insights gleaned from the flight of birds may one day be applied to fields as far-ranging as autonomous cars and crowd control. Anyone who has ever observed a large flock of starlings in flight – darting and swirling as if the entire flock were one big beautiful being – cannot help but marvel and wonder at how all those birds keep from crashing into one another. Nick Ouellette is studying the in-flight behavior of birds to draw lessons he can apply to engineerin...
Mar 06, 2020•28 min•Ep. 104
How a revealing father-daughter conversation led to a career dedicated to studying and treating severe trauma and stress-related disorders. Shaili Jain first got interested in studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on an East Coast road trip listening to her father describe his experiences during the 1947 Partition of British India. As she listened to details of his trauma and losses, many revealed to her only for the first time, Jain realized she had a deep personal connection to trauma...
Feb 29, 2020•28 min•Ep. 103
A rapidly shifting legal debate is raging in healthcare over patient data and privacy. One legal expert says that even though regulations have lagged, a reckoning is due. How much control should patients have over who sees their medical records? How readily should researchers share patient-level data from their clinical studies? In today’s world, should the answers to these questions depend on whether the data are “anonymized?” These are but a few of the ethical and legal conundrums that Michell...
Feb 24, 2020•28 min•Ep. 102
An expert in infectious diseases says that vaccinations are more powerful than ever, but better communication by the medical community is needed to combat misinformation. Stanford professor Yvonne “Bonnie” Maldonado is a medical doctor and an expert in pediatric infectious diseases. She has been fighting and preventing disease her entire career. She says that vaccinations have made remarkable progress in recent years and yet, despite well-known programs that have virtually wiped out once-dreaded...
Feb 19, 2020•28 min
The geostationary satellites used for communication and weather forecasting today are very large and very expensive — and most are still functioning perfectly when they must be disposed of because they run out of fuel. In their place, Stanford astronautics professor Simone D’Amico imagines an new era of smaller, less expensive, more efficient satellites that work in tandem to accomplish things their bigger brethren never imagined. He calls it distributed space systems — formations or “swarms” of...
Feb 13, 2020•28 min•Ep. 99
Photonics engineers are working toward a day when fast, energy efficient computers do their mathematics using photons — packets of light — instead of electrons. Experts estimate that computers gobble up as much as 10% of global electricity. They predict that that share will only grow as data centers expand and the internet of things brings scads of new computer-controlled devices to the world. Jelena Vuckovic is an electrical engineer who sees a light on the horizon — quite literally. She is bui...
Jan 24, 2020•28 min•Ep. 98
Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>> Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook...
Jan 21, 2020•28 min•Ep. 95
Computer programs that purport to help humans learn have been around almost as long as there have been computer programs, but their track record for success has been less than impressive. Emma Brunskill, an expert on artificial intelligence and machine learning, thinks that less-than-stellar record is about to change and has dedicated her career to finding new and better ways to teach computers to teach humans. Her research creates innovative "reinforcement learning" algorithms in which computer...
Jan 10, 2020•28 min•Ep. 94
A biomechanical engineer explains how new diagnostics and improved understanding of human movement are yielding great leaps forward in the treatment of motor dysfunction. Engineer Scott Delp first got interested in the details of human movement when he was injured in a skiing accident and spent five years trying to recover. Back then, today’s powerful diagnostic tools, like MRI, weren’t generally available, and Delp experienced many roadblocks and false starts in his recovery. Delp turned that c...
Dec 13, 2019•28 min•Ep. 97
Russ Altman: Today on The Future of Everything, the future of detecting DNA in your blood. Now DNA is the building block of life. It is a relatively simple long molecule or polymer made out of four components or DNA bases which have one letter abbreviations, the famous ATCG, which stand for their chemical names. It’s like a string of beans, beads, beads, but it is long. A human genome is made of about three billion DNA bases, divided into 23 chromosomes. So if you add up the beads in each chromo...
Nov 22, 2019•28 min•Ep. 100
They make a remarkable array of chemicals to survive the world around them. One engineer is using that knowledge to help people live better. When things aren’t going well for humans and other ambulatory creatures, they simply move on to a new location, a new life. For plants, it’s different, says chemical engineer Elizabeth Sattely, who studies the evolutionary adaptations plants make to survive. Unable to migrate, plants must make do with the hand that’s dealt them. And sometimes that hand is n...
Nov 15, 2019•28 min•Ep. 96
In breast cancer pathology, a 2 percent chance of malignancy is the accepted threshold at which a radiologist refers the patient for further study. In reality, that threshold varies among doctors; some are more conservative, others less so. The result is either more false positives, in which a healthy patient worries unnecessarily they have cancer, or more-worrisome false negatives, in which a patient is told they are fine when they are not. One researcher working to reduce that gap is Stanford’...
Oct 25, 2019•28 min•Ep. 93
In cancer detection, could a blood test replace a biopsy? Once, when a cancer was suspected, the next move often involved a biopsy – literally cutting out human tissue to ascertain malignancy. But that highly invasive model is now being overshadowed by the promise of “liquid biopsies.” In these non-invasive approaches, blood, spinal fluid and other bodily liquids are drawn and tested for the presence of cancer cells, bits of DNA or other molecules that are the unmistakable markers of serious dis...
Oct 18, 2019•28 min•Ep. 91
Women face many roadblocks to careers in data science and other STEM disciplines. One Stanford professor is out to change perceptions and realities for women in these fields. It was in 2015 when Margot Gerritsen was asked to speak at a data conference with not a single other woman on the program that she knew that something had to be done to get women into the field. As then-director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME), Gerritsen knew more than a thing or two a...
Oct 11, 2019•28 min•Ep. 85
How do new technologies and techniques for altering DNA get used? And who gets to use them? In recent years, the development of inexpensive genetic sequencing and easy gene editing technologies has given rise to a community of non-academic, amateur researchers who like to refer to themselves, only half-jokingly, as “biohackers.” But, says Mildred Cho, a research professor who has published frequently about bioethics, such communities are not bound by traditional “first-do-no-harm” ethical norms ...
Oct 04, 2019•28 min•Ep. 92
An expert on air quality talks about the hidden dangers inside our homes and offers some helpful tips on what you can do to reduce your exposure. We all know about the decades-long battle to improve air quality outdoors, but Stanford environmental engineer Lynn Hildemann says that while much progress has been made in that regard, it may have caused us to look past the pollutants in our own homes. Hildemann, who studies air pollution and its effects inside and outside the home, says that chemical...
Sep 27, 2019•28 min•Ep. 90
A mechanical engineer explains how more and better data is helping to create new prosthetics unlike any before. For years prosthetic limbs were merely functional devices, but recent advances in robotics and neuroscience are transforming the very meaning of the word "prosthetic." Steve Collins is a mechanical engineer who is helping to lead that transformation to the benefit of people who've had an amputation, stroke or battlefield injury. The field has come a long way since the days of strap-on ...
Sep 20, 2019•28 min
Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything, the future of the microbiome. Now, the microbiome has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. Now, what is a microbiome? I guess we will learn more, but for the purposes of this discussion, it’s the full set of microbial organisms, chiefly bacteria, but maybe others, that live in different niches within our body. Our mouth, nasal cavity, skin folds, everywhere that has contact with the outside world. The gut microbiome is one of those mic...
Sep 13, 2019•28 min•Ep. 88
Once the core American curriculum meant reading, writing and arithmetic, but Stanford professor Mehran Sahami says we might soon have to add a fourth skill to that list, “coding.” Sahami thinks deeply about such matters. He’s the leading force behind recent changes in Stanford’s computer science curriculum. He notes that it may not be surprising that more students are choosing to major in computer science than ever before, but what might turn heads is the changing face and intellectual landscape...
Aug 23, 2019•28 min•Ep. 87
Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything the future of Silicon Valley. Periodically, in human history every now and then there is an unusual mix of opportunity, capital, talent, technology in a geographical region that concentrates this and creates perhaps an unusual period of creativity, invention and sometimes great impact on a global scale. Far beyond, what you might expect from that local geography. I like to think about the Italian Art Renaissance in the 15th and 16th century, focuse...
Aug 16, 2019•28 min•Ep. 83
