Down To A ScienceBig ideas.
Broken down.

In Episode 8, Dean Lee, a computational biologist and the founder of Dean’s List, a newsletter and community for scientists building careers in biotech, joins Kevin G. Libuit to talk about the career crisis facing millennial scientists. Many life scientists followed the path they were given: years of training, an advanced degree, and a move to a biotech hub. Dean, who writes about life science careers for more than 50,000 followers, explains why that path isn’t paying off the way many expected, and what scientists can do about it now.

In Episode 7, Dr. Niamh O’Hara, CEO and co-founder of Biotia, joins Kevin G. Libuit to talk about bringing precision medicine to infectious disease. Many infections are still diagnosed by growing a sample in a petri dish, a method that dates back to the 1800s. Niamh explains how Biotia uses DNA sequencing and machine learning to identify infections that culture can miss.

In Episode 6, Dr. Ming “Tommy” Tang, a wet-lab biologist turned computational biologist and the founder of the blog Diving into Genetics and Genomics, joins Kevin G. Libuit to talk about what makes a good bioinformatician in the age of AI. Drawing on fourteen years in the field and near-daily use of AI coding agents, Tommy argues that writing the code is no longer the hard part: framing the right biological question is.

In Episode 5, Brandon Galang, GTM Engineer at Vercel and author of the Substack Leverage Loops, joins Kevin G. Libuit to talk about why being technical no longer depends on writing code. Drawing on a path from industrial engineering to product management at Intel, Amazon, and Wonder, Brandon argues that engineering is really the ability to keep iterating toward a solution.

In Episode 4, Dr. Sandeep Pawar, VP and General Manager of Life Sciences at Manifold, joins Kevin G. Libuit to break down how real-world data has evolved across three eras: from claims data, to clinical data from electronic health records, to today’s multimodal data spanning genomics, imaging, and wearables. He explains why the infrastructure for sharing and analyzing that data hasn’t kept pace.

In Episode 3, molecular biologist, biotech entrepreneur, and educator Dr. Tshaka Cunningham joins Kevin G. Libuit to explore how early exposure, mentorship, and hands-on training can help build the biotech workforce. He shares how his grandmother’s laboratory, his mother’s creativity, and his great-grandmother’s commitment to service shaped his life—and why seeing Black scientists in leadership helped him imagine his own path.

In this episode, Dr. Luke Short, Director of the Dallas County Public Health Laboratory, joins Kevin G. Libuit to explore AI adoption in public health. From reviewing standard operating procedures to building spreadsheets and scripts that can be inspected and validated, Luke shares practical ways AI can support laboratory teams while keeping human judgment and accountability at the center.

In this episode, David Aanensen shares his journey from neuroscience and web development to leading innovations in pathogen genomics and public health surveillance. We explore how technology, visualization, and AI are transforming infectious disease monitoring and the importance of data sovereignty.