Big Brains

The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll on our students. As we move into the summer, schools will need to understand the best way to address these issues.To understand what students have lost and how schools can help them recover, there’s no better person to talk to than Elaine Allensworth, the director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. On this episode, she explains what the best research tells us about education during this crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the most profound challenges in our world. One of the most prominent has been governmental dysfunction. As director for the Center For Effective Government at the , this is an issue close to Prof. William Howell’s work. So far, experts have largely wanted to focus on the actions of President Trump during this pandemic, but Howell says governmental ineffectiveness goes beyond just the president. It’s rooted deep in our political incentives and institutions.

One of the most tragic aspects of the coronavirus outbreak has been the disproportionate effect COVID-19 has had on communities of color in cities around the country. Assoc. Prof. Monica Peek of the University of Chicago Medicine has dedicated her practice and career to studying racial health disparities. Her research, and the work of many others, has shown that many diseases and chronic conditions disproportionately affect communities of color. Coronavirus is no exception.

The coronavirus outbreak has devastated many sectors of our society, and brought many of the issues we were facing before the pandemic to the forefront. This is especially true of health care. Prof. Katherine Baicker is a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy and dean of the Harris School of Public Policy. She explains how the coronavirus is revealing how our public and private health systems need to change today and in the future to address this pandemic and the pandemics to come.

Why do we feel empathy for some people, but not others? Where does this feeling of empathy come from? These questions have been the focus of one University of Chicago neurobiologist’s career. And to find answers, Prof. Peggy Mason started studying an unlikely creature: rats. It turns out that rodents have a lot to teach us about empathy. And the implications of Mason’s work give us important insights into how to tackle some of society’s most difficult problems.

The coronavirus outbreak is a tragedy. Much of the attention has been on the disease itself, but many experts have started focusing on the economic effects. Some are even hinting that they could be just as disastrous in the long-term. Why exactly could this disease derail China's economy, and what would that look like if it did? There’s no better person to ask than Chang-Tai Hsieh, a Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, and a faculty director of the Becker Friedman Institute in China.

Since its inception, the Doomsday Clock has measured our time until apocalypse in minutes. This year, for the first time, the clock set our time to midnight in just seconds.  The Bulletin cited two major factors in their decision: the threat of nuclear destruction and the ever worsening problem of climate change. But are we really closer to nuclear destruction than during the Cold War? And is there any hope that we could turn the hands of doom back on climate change?

University of Chicago alumnus Bill Browder’s story sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller—except it’s all true. He just wanted to be a businessman, but his experience as a foreign investor in Russia would push him to become an international activist. Today, Browder, travels the globe trying to convince countries to adopt a law called the Magnitsky Act, which he says is the future of how we fight human rights abuse.

University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales often says that only an immigrant like himself can really appreciate American capitalism. In his native Italy, Zingales says what you know and what you do are far less important that who you know and what you do for them.  But in the last decade, Zingales says the United States has started to look more and more like the country he left. Now, he’s trying to save American capitalism from itself—and big businesses including Amazon, Facebook and Google.

In October of 2019, Google announced their supercomputer had reached quantum supremacy. With that announcement, and as we take a short break for the holidays, we thought we should replay a prior Big Brains episode for you with David Awschalom, one of the world's leading quantum scientists. Awschalom is turning what was once in the realm of science fiction into reality—which could offer revolutionary breakthroughs in communications, digital encryption, sensor technology and even medicine.

Every election year, poll after poll tries to predict where millennials stand politically. As we head into 2020, we'd like to replay this episode with Prof. Cathy Cohen who says some of our assumptions about young people are all wrong. Cohen’s innovative survey, GenForward, is a first of its kind. By oversampling young people of color, they investigate differences in responses by race and ethnicity. The data she’s collected gives us a unique window into what millennials might do in the 2020 electio

It’s a simple question to ask, but seems impossible to answer: What causes one nation to succeed and another to fail? There are few people who have spent more time trying to answer this question than Prof. James Robinson. Robinson’ first book, Why Nations Fail, laid out in clear and stark terms what the origins of prosperity and poverty really are. Now, he’s written a sequel, The Narrow Corridor, which further explains what ingredients you need to create a prosperous nation.

Since the beginning of human history, we’ve looked up at the stars and wondered: Are we alone? No other generation has been able to find an answer, but David Charbonneau thinks we may be the first. He’s an astronomer at Harvard University and a recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Chicago this year. Charbonneau has made it his life’s goal to search the stars for habitable planets and alien life.

For most Americans, the driving force in their personal and public life is a desire to attain the “good life”. But what if our attachment to that desire is the very thing holding us back? Lauren Berlant is a theorist and English professor at the University of Chicago. Berlant has been writing about finding belonging in America her entire career. But she says the Presidency of Donald Trump has completely shattered our understanding of what it means to have a public and a shared connection as citizens.

In the last decade, there has been a mass migration of people into urban areas. This rapid urbanization has been increasingly unsustainable for our cities and it’s projected to get worse in the next decade. University of Chicago scholar Luis Bettencourt is tackling this global crisis by researching the underlying processes that dictate our cities. If you can understand the numbers, you can create models for the sustainable cities our planet needs. He’s starting by mapping a million neighborhoods.