Q&As

Materialism, a podcast exploring the past, present and future of materials science, is turning five. Co-founders and co-hosts Taylor Sparks (a professor at the University of Utah) and Andrew Falkowski (a PhD student in Sparks’ group) discuss how they use storytelling to create compelling episodes and share their journey and lessons learned.

The 2021 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting was a hybrid event for the first time, featuring both an in-person meeting in Boston and a virtual meeting held separately. Nature Reviews Materials speaks to Gopal Rao, Chief Editor of Technical Content for MRS and Editor of MRS Bulletin, to find out what pandemic-era conference planning is like.

Lipid nanoparticles are essential to mRNA vaccines. The groundwork for lipid-based drug delivery systems was laid more than 40 years ago in the lab of Pieter Cullis, Professor at the University of British Columbia. Nature Reviews Materials talks to Pieter Cullis about the history and future of lipid nanoparticle–nucleic acid drugs.

Google Applied Science is a division of Google Research that applies computational methods, and in particular machine learning, to a broad range of scientific problems. Patrick Riley, until recently one of their software engineers and now head of artificial intelligence at Relay Therapeutics, talks to Nature Reviews Materials about his experience working on machine-learning projects in an industrial setting.

Nature Reviews Materials speaks to Donald Ingber, Founding Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, about the animal testing conundrum and the importance of human-relevant models in biomedical research.