All in the (Scientific) Family

February 26, 2019 • by Marc Airhart

Scientists often talk about the people who mentored them, and the students and postdocs they supervise, in ways that sound like a family.

A casual photo of college students and faculty sitting on a living room floor

Kip Thorne surrounded by students and other members of his lab at Caltech—his scientific family—circa 1972. At bottom left is Bill Press, Thorne’s former PhD student and now professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Other notable scientists include David Lee (bottom right), founder of Global Crossing Ltd. and current Board Chair of Caltech, and Alan Lightman (behind and to the right of Thorne), a physics professor at MIT, essayist and novelist. Photo courtesy of Bill Press.


Today, in the second of a two-part conversation, we listen in on two members of a well-known scientific lineage: Bill Press, a professor of computer science and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin and his former doctoral adviser, Kip Thorne, one of the recipients of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves.

Diagram showing how different scientists are connected to the 2017 Nobel prize in physics

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