Why Q-Lab

Anil Ananthaswamy is a former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He is a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. He organizes and teaches an annual science writing workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. He is a freelance feature editor for PNAS Front Matter. He writes for Nature, Quanta and Scientific American, and has contributed to Nautilus, Matter, The Wall Street Journal, Discover and the UK’s Literary Review, among others. He’s the author of four books: The Edge of Physics, voted book of the year in 2010 by UK’s Physics World; The Man Who Wasn’t There, long-listed for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; Through Two Doors at Once, named one of Smithsonian's Favorite Books of 2018 and one of Forbes's 2018 Best Books About Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics; and Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, published in July 2024 (Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton called it “a masterpiece”). Anil was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT-Madras (Chennai, India) and is currently a Professor of Practice there, in the Department of Data Science and AI, where he teaches an introductory course on machine learning and AI.

Dr. Susanne Beck is an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Management & Analytics Group at Warwick Business School. Before joining WBS, she was senior researcher at Copenhagen Business School and the Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Center in Vienna. Her main research interest is the role of digital technologies on the management and organization of scientific knowledge production. Her work has received several awards including from the Academy of Management, Industry & Innovation, PDMA JPIM Research Forum, European Academy of Management, and the R&D Management conference. She serves as Program Chair on the leadership team of the Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) division of the Academy of Management, she co-organizes the annual Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Research Conference which attracts 100+ participants from across multiple disciplines every year. She has also coordinated multiple large international and interdisciplinary collaborative publications with up to 50 co-authors, has been invited to give keynote speeches at international events, and served as a lead guest editor for a Special Issue in Industry and Innovation.

Andrew Caplin is Silver Professor of Economics at New York University. His research in cognitive economics increasingly focuses on question-driven learning: how individuals and organizations identify what they need to know, formulate productive questions, and organize inquiry to improve decisions and discover new possibilities.

His recent Palgrave Macmillan Pivot book, An Introduction to Cognitive Economics: The Science of Mistakes, outlines the development of this rapidly growing field. Two further volumes are forthcoming. Organized Inquiry: Modeling and Measuring the Modern Economy develops a framework for understanding and measuring how inquiry is organized, particularly in the age of AI. AI and Human Purpose: Cognitive Economics and the Engineering of Alignment explores how these ideas can help redesign educational and research practices to meet the extraordinary opportunities and challenges created by AI.

Dr Alex Fischer helps institutions and people tackle complex social and environmental challenges by asking better, and often different, questions about the opportunities and future they want. He has been a senior member of government initiatives on democratic resilience, United Nations programs on environmental security and sustainable development, and social enterprises delivering rural safe drinking water. Through the Australian Resilient Democracy Network, he supports conversations bridging researchers, public servants, civil society, philanthropy, and communities to explore, monitor and strengthen civic innovation, collective decision making, and social cohesion. He has published widely on democratic innovation, institutional change, sustainable development, and public decision-making.

Dr. Pia Lauritzen is a Danish philosopher, tech inventor, and keynote speaker whose work explores how the questions we ask, and don't ask, shape our thinking, technology, and leadership. She has published six books, created the Qvest and Question Jam platforms, and analyzed more than 30,000 questions asked by people around the world. Her contributions have earned international recognition, including being shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Radar Award for showing how questions, not ready-made answers, define our future. In her regular column for Forbes, she asks big questions about tech and transformation, and she shares her research on LinkedIn Learning, podcasts, TEDAI and TEDx events.

Alan C Love is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Director of Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on conceptual issues that arise in different areas of biological science. Much of his work has concentrated on the concepts of evolutionary innovation and novelty, which have been at the center of the research agenda articulated by many biologists situated in evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo). He is also interested in issues that arise in developmental biology and functional morphology. He uses a combination of approaches to investigate a variety of philosophical questions: conceptual change, explanatory pluralism, the structure of evolutionary theory, reductionism, the nature of historical science, and interdisciplinary epistemology. Another area of interest concerns methodological questions, such as the role of history in philosophical research and the nature of intuitions generated by thought experiments in philosophical inquiry.

Laura Maher is Chief of Staff and Director of External Engagement at Siegel Family Endowment, where she leads efforts to align technology development and investment with social challenges. She co-designed and launched Siegel’s inquiry-driven approach to philanthropy organized around collaborative investigation of shared questions. With nearly 20 years of experience at the intersection of technology and global policy, her current focus is on designing philanthropic strategy, shaping narratives, and convening field leaders to navigate frontier AI capabilities and build durable public-interest tech infrastructure. Her early career centered on technology for global education and development through roles at the UN, World Bank, and international nonprofits. She holds master's degrees from Tufts Fletcher School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Marion Poetz is an Associate Professor of Innovation Management at the Department of Strategy and Innovation at CBS, where she investigates how science and innovation can be organized to address complex societal challenges in areas such as health and sustainability. Her work has been published in leading academic and practitioner journals such as Management Science, Research Policy, and Harvard Business Review, and has been recognized with multiple awards. She serves as a Chair of the Association for Advancing Science and Innovation, which organizes the annual Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Research Conference. She also founded the Institute for Innovation Capability Building and created the Lab for Open Innovation in Science (LOIS). Marion acts as an advisor, board member, and consultant to organizations across sectors. She holds a PhD from WU Vienna and has been a visiting scholar at MIT Sloan School of Management, Bocconi University, and ETH Zurich. She is affiliated with the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID), the Academy of Management (AoM), and the Young Global Leaders community of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Giulio Quaggiotto is a Strategic Innovation Advisor in the UAE’s Prime Minister’s Office, where he leads programs aimed at demonstrating new possibilities for public service. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and a Digital Statecraft Fellow. Giulio led UNDP’s global Strategic Innovation unit, where he designed the Deep Demonstration program, implemented in 90 countries . He was a Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), focusing on lead user innovation. Giulio’s career spans leadership roles at Climate KIC, Nesta, WWF, and the World Bank. Additionally, he managed the Jakarta Lab of the UN Global Pulse. His research interests include portfolio approaches to innovation and lead user innovation.

Andrea Renda is Director of Research at CEPS and leads the CEPS Unit on Global Governance, Regulation, Innovation and the Digital Economy (GRID). He is Adjunct Professor of Digital Policy at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute (opens in a new tab), and contributes research to the Global Peace Tech Hub (opens in a new tab). Andrea is a non-resident Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics (opens in a new tab), and Visiting Professor of Competition Policy and the Digital Economy at the College of Europe (opens in a new tab). He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Science (opens in a new tab), a CITI Fellow at Columbia University’s Centre for Tele-Information (opens in a new tab) and a member of the European Parliament’s STOA International Advisory Board (opens in a new tab). He is currently the Vice Chair of the advisory group on Economic and Societal Impacts of Research (ESIR) (opens in a new tab), the Co-director of the Brookings/CEPS Forum for Global Cooperation on AI (opens in a new tab). He is also a member of the OECD Network of Experts on AI (opens in a new tab), sits in the Advisory Board of the University College Dublin’s Centre for Digital Policy; (opens in a new tab) and in the Steering Committee of the “Regulatory Diplomacy in Artificial Intelligence” project at the Global Partnership on AI’s International Center of Expertise in Montreal on Artificial Intelligence (CEIMIA). He is the Co-Coordinator and Strategy Director of the PERISCOPE project, and the Director of the Trade and Technology Dialogue (opens in a new tab).

Nathalie Starke is a business psychologist, systemic coach and facilitator based in Innsbruck, Austria. She holds a B.A. in Educational, Learning and Training Psychology and an M.Sc. in Business Psychology. Through her practice, The Question Lab (opens in a new tab), she develops questioning as a core competence in organizations, helping leaders, employees and teams ask more and better questions through keynotes, trainings and coaching.

Nathalie brings a practitioner’s perspective to the science of inquiry. Her work is rooted in systemic coaching, a tradition with a highly developed methodology of questions designed to help others find their own answers. For years she has applied this methodology with clients and trained 300+ people in systemic coaching. She combines a grounding in the psychology of organizations with deep facilitation experience and a strong interest in what makes a question transformative. She lectures at BSP Business & Law School Berlin and FH Oberösterreich and spoke on the art of asking questions at TEDxGraz 2025 (opens in a new tab).

Dr. Strug is Professor in the Departments of Statistical Sciences, Computer Science and cross-appointed in Biostatistics at the University of Toronto and is a Senior Scientist in the Program in Genetics and Genome Biology at the Hospital for Sick Children. Dr. Strug is the inaugural Director of the Data Sciences Institute (DSI), a tri-campus, multi-divisional, multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary hub for data science activity at the University of Toronto and affiliated Research Institutes. She is a statistical geneticist and her research focuses on the development of novel statistical approaches to analyze and integrate multi-omics data to identify genetic contributors to complex human disease. She has received several honours including the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Genome Data Science.

Dr Lani Watson is a philosopher, author and YouTuber. She is known as The Questions Doctor on social media. Her book "Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers" is published by Penguin in the UK and US and is being translated into at least 14 languages. Lani is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and previously a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on questioning in everyday life, from classrooms and courtrooms to press rooms and board rooms and the answer-rich online world. She is passionate about applying her expertise to help everyone make the most of asking great questions, having worked with a variety of businesses and organisations around the world.

Dennis Whitcomb (PhD, Rutgers) is Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University. He has published many academic articles about questions and about closely related topics such as curiosity, intellectual humility, and logic. He co-edited (among other books) The Moral Psychology of Curiosity (opens in a new tab) and he co-organizes The Inquiry Network (opens in a new tab), an organization dedicated to fostering scholarly research about inquiry. He also focuses on questions in his role as a teacher, practicing question-focused pedagogy and occasionally writing (opens in a new tab) about it.