Featuring Dr. Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman Residential College at Yale University and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast, in conversation with Carl Zimmer, science writer and Matter columnist at The New York Times. Santos will explore what new results in psychological science teach us about how to be happier, how to feel less stressed, how to flourish more, and how to put these scientific findings into practice by building the sorts of habits that will allow us to live a happier and more fulfilling life.
Dr. Laurie Santos is Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. Dr. Santos is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. Her new course, Psychology and the Good Life, teaches students how the science of psychology can provide important hints about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. Her course recently became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one of our four students at Yale enrolled. Her course has been featured in numerous news outlets including the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, Slate and O! Magazine. A winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching, she was recently voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds and was named in Time Magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Her new podcast The Happiness Lab has had over 20 million downloads in its first year.
Carl Zimmer is the author of thirteen books about science. His newest book is “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.” His column Matter appears each week in the New York Times. Zimmer’s writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh” won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award and was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. It was chosen for the 2018 shortlist for Baillie-Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, and The Guardian named it the best science book of 2018. Zimmer created the podcast “What Is Life?” and is a familiar voice on other programs such as Radiolab. A professor adjunct at Yale University, he lives in Connecticut. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.
