Stuart J. Firestein

Sen. Stuart Firestein is Professor of Neuroscience at in the Department of Biological Sciences.  His research focuses on the vertebrate olfactory system, perhaps the best chemical detector on the planet.  He completed his Ph.D. in neurobiology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 and was a post doctoral fellow at Yale University Medical School. In 1991 he joined the faculty at Columbia, becoming a  full professor in 1998.  His laboratory has received continuous funding from NIH and private foundations for the past 25 years.

Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience Firestein serves as an advisor for the A. P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science. In 2011, he received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. He is a AAAS Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.  He recently joined the Santa Fe Institute as a member of the (visiting) Fractal Faculty.  At Columbia he is on the advisory boards of the Center for Science and Society (CSS) and the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience – both centers for interdisciplinary work between the sciences and the humanities – and the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Paris Global Center. His book on the workings of science for a general audience called Ignorance, How it Drives Science was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. His second book, Failure: Why Science is So Successful, appeared in October 2015. They have been translated into 12 languages and remain in print.

He has lectured extensively in university and public venues, nationally and internationally including a TED talk in 2013 that has accumulated over 3 million views. He speaks regularly for primary school educators and students on the place of science in modern culture and the often forgotten values of ignorance, failure and uncertainty.