In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Itai Yanai, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and Scientific Director of the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratories at New York University Langone Health. Outside of his very accomplished academic career, Itai hosts the awesome podcast Night Science with Dr. Martin Lercher, in which they interview guests about their own styles and methods of thinking about science. Night Science, as Itai describes here, is the aspect of research involving the pondering, the processing, and the development of testable hypotheses. This is compared to Day Science, in which researchers are actually executing experiments, writing code, and generating data. Itai’s own research spans several fields, including making sense of the human transcriptome, single-cell analysis, gene expression profiling, and gene regulation and development.
What sticks out to me about Itai is his ability to truly think deeply about biology. I believe this stems from his detailed appreciation for the scientific process itself, which includes building out time to think about science and the topics he studies as opposed to simply doing experiments and analyzing data. We discuss tricks to become better thinkers and the importance of having collaborators that we can bounce ideas off of for the sake of improving our projects. We also discuss his experience as a science communicator through the Night Science Podcast as well as his book, Society of Genes, and blog for Genome Biology.
Useful Links:
Night Science Podcast Website
