Stuart J. Firestein is the chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his laboratory is researching the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron.

Firestein worked in theater for almost 20 years in San Francisco and Los Angeles and rep companies on the East Coast.

In his 2012 book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, Firestein argues that pursuing research based on what we don't know is more valuable than building on what we do know.

When asked why he wrote the book, Firestein replied, "I came to the realization at some point several years ago that these kids [his students] must actually think we know all there is to know about neuroscience.

"[8] The book was largely based on his class on ignorance, where each week he invited a professor from the hard sciences to lecture for two hours on what they do not know.

Knowledge enables scientists to propose and pursue interesting questions about data that sometimes don't exist or fully make sense yet.

Firestein claims that scientists fall in love with their own ideas to the point that their own biases start dictating the way they look at the data.

[9][10][11] Firestein is married to Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist at Hunter College and the City University of New York, where she studies animal behavior.