Gut Churn

Speaker: 
Radiolab's Jad Abumrad
 
19 Oct 2015
 
7:00 PM
 
Great Hall, Memorial Union

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Free event | No tickets needed | Doors open at 6:15

Jad Abumrad is producer and co-host of Radiolab, a show about curiosity where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Radiolab, heard weekly on NPR, is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to enhance public understanding of science and technology. Topics have ranged from how Charles Darwin's 150-year-old discoveries about human emotion are helping Facebook users; details of the world's longest running experiment; an examination of one proposal to communicate with the dead; and a discussion of whether photos in this Digital Age cause us to forget. This lecture is the personal story of how Abumrad, a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and the son of a doctor and scientist, invented a new aesthetic and how those negative feelings we have during the creative process - gut churn - can propel us forward.

Jad Abumrad did most of his growing up in Tennessee, before studying creative writing and music composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. Following graduation, Abumrad wrote music for films, and reported and produced documentaries for a variety of local and national public radio programs, including On The Media, Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, Morning Edition, All Things Considered and WNYC's "24 Hours at the Edge of Ground Zero." While working on staff at WNYC, Abumrad began tinkering with an idea for a new kind of radio program. That idea evolved into one of public radio’s most popular shows today – Radiolab. Abumrad hosts the program with Robert Krulwich and also serves as one of its producers. The program won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award and explores big questions in science, philosophy and mankind. Under Abumrad’s direction, the show uses a combination of deep-dive journalism, narrative storytelling, dialogue and music to craft compositions of exploration and discovery. Radiolab podcasts are downloaded over 4 million times each month and the program is carried on 437 stations across the nation.