90 | Night Science at the DOE – Katy Huff

Prof. Kathryn Huff from the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently spent three years as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the US Department of Energy. Katy shares how ideas emerge and develop within the hierarchies of government, and she reveals the secret to getting confirmed by the US Senate. We discuss how leaders can foster creativity by removing organizational constraints and why building relationships across institutional boundaries is so important, both in government and in academia.Worth a look: 50×50: Science Across America – 50 creators, 50 scientists, 50 states, 50 videos over ten weeks in 2026, from the Independent Media Initiative. It goes where science actually happens, with the people who actually do it – which is the part we're always most curious about. https://www.5050science.com/The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

What if an intensive science course wasn't primarily about learning techniques or producing results, but about learning how to think like a scientist? To explore that question, Itai visited the legendary Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to meet the instructors and students of its annual six-week course on microbial diversity. He discovered an extraordinary environment where students are encouraged to venture outside their comfort zones, follow their curiosity, and pursue questions they genuinely care about – “Let’s just do it, we’ll get to the rigor later!” The real outcome of the course isn't a publication or a new technique. It's a new way of thinking about science – one that gives Night Science its rightful place. Could this be a model for how we should train scientists everywhere?Thank you to Amaranta Kahn, John Spear, Scott Dawson, Leslie Day, Dallas Mould, Jason Baer and Ioana Stanca for speaking with Itai at Woods Hole.The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

What happens when AI starts doing science? We talk with Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec about AI agents that find patterns in large datasets, come up with hypotheses and try to kill them with more data, enduring the tedious work human scientists would rather avoid. What are we human scientists still uniquely good for? Taste, judgment, intuition, emotion, procrastination? And we discuss whether AI might be opening up a whole new continent of discoveries, a terra incognita with plenty of ways to get lost and found.Worth a look: 50×50: Science Across America – 50 creators, 50 scientists, 50 states, 50 videos over ten weeks in 2026, from the Independent Media Initiative. It goes where science actually happens, with the people who actually do it – which is the part we're always most curious about. https://www.5050science.com/The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

What can early-career scientists teach us about creativity? For this special episode, we talked to PhD students and postdocs about their creative processes. They told us about finding scientific ideas in art museums, sketching on whiteboards, borrowing concepts from other disciplines, going to unrelated seminars, swimming, hiking, talking in pubs, and deliberately letting ideas lie fallow like in a crop rotation system. Through this diversity, a few themes kept coming back: openness, play, visual thinking, talking, and incubation. This episode is also a reminder of something that is easy to forget amid the frustrations of academic life: science gives us the extraordinary freedom to think without bounds, ask questions, and spend our lives solving puzzles.The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

What can comedy teach us about scientific discovery? With stand-up comedian and former research scientist Sarah Adelman, we discuss the surprising parallels between jokes and discoveries. Sarah shares her path from public health research to comedy, and we explore how the willingness to bomb on stage, searching for punchlines, and creating a playful “writer’s room” atmosphere have close analogies in the creative scientific process. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Professor Robert Root-Bernstein has not only made many scientific discoveries,  but has also written extensively about the creative process, including in Sparks of Genius (with Michele Root-Bernstein) and in his latest book, The Arts of Eminent Scientists. Bob found that successful scientists do not treat their “lazy” creative pursuits, such as painting, music, or writing, as distractions from science, but integrate them into one coherent life. Among other things, we also explore problem finding and how artistic practices can sharpen observation and generate powerful analogies.The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Professor Lois Hetland, the former chair of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art, joins us to ask: what do artists and scientists truly share? We explore the striking parallels between artistic practice and scientific discovery – between Night Science, the messy and playful mental state where ideas are formed, and her “Studio Habits of Mind”, such as observing closely, envisioning possibilities, and exploring at the edge of the unknown. We converge on a central point: how frustration and insecurity are inherent in the creative process wherever it unfolds. And Lois argues that we can cultivate creativity through the right environment, one that embraces experimentation, mistakes, and sustained engagement – the same topics that many of our scientist guests have brought up.The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a leading thinker on artificial intelligence, analogy, and abstraction. She reflects on how analogy quietly drives creativity and scientific discovery even in the most rigorous fields. Analogies often emerge during moments of mental rest and don’t need to be accurate to nudge you into new avenues of thinking. We discuss how many core scientific concepts began as metaphors, how analogies can both illuminate and mislead, and whether large language models truly grasp abstraction. The conversation ranges from the role of analogies in Einstein’s thought process to evolutionary “landscapes” and the balance between generative night science and critical day science.The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues co-direct the Laboratory of Morphogenesis at Rockefeller University. They are also married. Together, we reflect on what it means to think creatively in biology. Amy and Alan discuss the importance of challenging established frameworks, cultivating a “feeling for the organism,” and balancing conceptual imagination with close attention to observable phenomena. They are true science buddies, with their complementarity and partnership allowing them to challenge each other by diving deeper into the ambiguity and loneliness of research.Join our Train-the-Trainer Event to learn how to teach Night Science, April 24th at the New York Academy of Sciences! https://night-science.org/train-the-trainer-workshop/The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

It’s surprising that for centuries, scientists have left the study of how to do science largely to non-scientists. Not anymore – thanks to the young field of cognitive epistemology. In this episode, we discuss the exciting – and surprising – science of doing science with Marina Dubova, a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute and soon a professor at UC Berkeley. Marina found, for example, that to get the most powerful theories, you should not plan the collection of data with a view to falsify or validate existing hypotheses; instead, try to get as diverse a dataset as possible. It adds a new angle to an idea that we discussed in many previous episodes: that discoveries often arise from exploratory data collection. Based on Marina’s research and her own process, we also discuss how science thrives on diversity at all levels – data, ideas, questions, scientists – and on the use of analogies and metaphors. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .