Once a Scientist

About Once a Scientist

Once A Scientist is a podcast about how science is changing and the people changing with it. Hosted by scientist and entrepreneur Nick Edwards, the show features conversations with researchers, founders, technologists, investors, and operators working at the edges of biology, AI, automation, robotics, and drug discovery. Guests talk about the technologies reshaping scientific work, the problems they believe are worth solving, and the often-unplanned paths that brought them there. Along the way, Nick explores a bigger question: as machines take on more of the work of reading, analyzing, designing, and eventually executing experiments, what becomes possible for science—and what becomes more important for scientists? Once A Scientist is about where science is going, who is building it, and how the next generation of scientists can find their place in it.

Publisher

Nick Edwards

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 Apr 2020

Latest episode

15 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

10 of 103 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   15 Sept 2026

   98. Renee Wegrzyn and Anna Marie Wagner, Founders of Transfyr, on Why Science's Reproducibility Problem Isn't in the Lab Notebook

   Renee Wegrzyn, PhD, is co-founder of Transfyr AI. Recognized as a TIME 100 Innovator, Rock Health Top 50 Digital Health Innovator, and recipient of the Superior Public Service Medal, Renee holds a BS and PhD in Applied Biology and Bioengineering from Georgia Tech. She spent over a decade at DARPA, including as a program manager focused on gene editing and biomanufacturing and as a technical advisor to IARPA, where she ran "moonshot" programs. She later became VP of Business Development & ...

2. 

   18 Aug 2026

   97. Ron Alfa, CEO of NOETIK, on Biology as a Search Problem

   Ron is Co-Founder and CEO of NOETIK, a next generation precision oncology company using multimodal foundation models pre-trained on large-scale human tumor data to discover cancer therapeutics. He holds an MD and PhD from Stanford University School of Medicine, where he completed his doctoral work in Neuroscience, and has a MA in History of Medicine from UCL. Prior to founding Noetik, Ron was Senior Vice President, Head of Research and acting-CSO at Recursion, where he led the company’s scien...

3. 

   29 Jul 2026

   96. Chris Anderson, Advisor to Pillar VC and former Wired Editor, on How Adjacent Technologies Will Transform Lab Automation

   Chris Anderson currently serves as an advisor at Pillar VC and Renaissance Philanthropy. He was editor of WIRED and spent seven years at The Economist, where he worked as editor of both the technology and business sections. Anderson holds a degree in physics from UC Berkeley, has conducted research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and has done stints at the leading journals Nature and Science.

Inside a recent episode

Ep 95. Stacie Calad-Thomson, Head of BioPharma Labs and Manufacturing BD at NVIDIA, on AI as an endless collaborator

Published 10 Jun 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Yeah. And so even then I was starting to see the opportunities of computational approaches and just recognizing how much 90% of clinical trials fail, right? It takes six years to get from target to candidate. It takes 12 years on average to get a drug to market and $2 billion. And like the majority of our research, like never sees the light of day because it fails before we even get to like a clinical trial, right? Yeah. So there's so much waste and failure that happens in R&D. And there's got to be a better way to do it. And I think has always been my approach. And while I was early, I was maybe early in the believing that AI could find us a better way. […]

Who has been a guest on Once a Scientist

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Stacie Calad-Thomson
• Ira Hoffman
• Jason Kelly
• Ashlee Vance
• Michael Koeris

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.9 / 5

54 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

16 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 34 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

35

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

85

Contact Once a Scientist

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Shows with a similar audience

• 

  BioCentury This Week

• 

  All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

• 

  Dwarkesh Podcast

• 

  The Readout Loud

• 

  Hard Fork

• 

  The Pitch

Questions about Once a Scientist