Meet the Youngest & First Woman Dean of MIT

He Went from studying Greek to Biggest Prize in Math

On August 1, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro, the world of mathematics celebrated its highest achievement by awarding the Fields Medal to Alessio Figalli. Known as an "optimizer" since childhood, Figalli mastered a problem that is both ancient and essential to modern life: finding the most efficient way to move something from point A to point B. In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we follow the journey of a young man who entered university without knowing basic calculus and rose to become a master of "optimal transport," a theory that explains everything from city logistics to the shifting of clouds.

She is Youngest Woman to Win Nobel of Astrophysics

Late on a clear summer night in Ontario, a ten-year-old girl stepped out of her tent and froze, spellbound by the glittering expanse overhead. Sara Seager had never seen so many stars, and that moment of wonder sparked a lifelong quest to map hidden worlds. From a childhood marked by a dismissive household to becoming a pioneer of exoplanet discovery, Seager’s story is one of unyielding curiosity and the resilience to follow a bright spark into the unknown. In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we chart her journey from the "highest monkey bars" in Toronto to the cutting edge of atmospheric spectroscopy at MIT and Harvard.

Doctor who drank Bacteria, Cured Himself & Won Nobel

Imagine it is 1982, and a young physician is standing in a microbiology lab, staring at a Petri dish he nearly threw away. After more than 30 failed attempts to culture a mysterious bacterium, he is about to prove that a tiny microbe—not stress or spicy food—is the true cause of painful stomach ulcers. In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we dive into the gut-wrenching story of Barry Marshall. Facing scoffing peers and billion-dollar drug companies that ignored his findings, Marshall did the unthinkable: he made his own body the laboratory by drinking a beaker full of infectious bacteria. It was a radical act of "personal science" that would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize and save millions of lives.

Meet the Youngest & First Woman Dean of MIT

Imagine two black holes merging 1.3 billion years ago, releasing more energy in a single second than 4,000 suns release in their entire lifetimes. In 2015, the impossibly faint tremors of that collision finally reached Earth—a vibration a thousand times smaller than the diameter of an atomic nucleus. Hearing that "silent music" required the most sensitive instruments ever created: the twin detectors of LIGO. In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we explore the journey of Nergis Mavalvala, the physicist who spent decades wrestling with the "quantum storm" of the universe to create a quiet so profound that the whisper of a distant cosmic collision could finally be heard.

This Harvard Physicist is called next “Einstein”

In 2009, a sixteen-year-old girl flew solo in a single-engine plane she had built herself from 15,000 rivets and an engine she assembled outside her bedroom. Today, that same spirit of "audacious innocence" is directed toward the very foundations of reality. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, a first-generation Cuban-American theorist, is now leading a global effort to answer one of the most demanding questions in science: Is our three-dimensional universe actually a hologram? In this episode of Mavericks of Science, we trace the journey of a "maker" who mastered the physical world before turning to the deep, mathematical laws that allow it to exist.