Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 07:05, 28 March 2024

Andrew Huberman
Huberman in 2016
Born	Andrew David Huberman (1975-09-26) September 26, 1975 (age 49) Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Education	University of California, Santa Barbara (BA) University of California, Berkeley (MA) University of California, Davis (PhD)
Parent	Bernardo Huberman
Scientific career
Fields	Neuroscience
Institutions	Stanford University University of California, San Diego
Thesis	Neural activity and axon guidance cue regulation of eye-specific retinogeniculate development (2004)
Academic advisors	Ben Barres (Stanford) Barbara Chapman (UCD) William DeBello (UCD) Hwai-Jong Cheng (UCD) Marc Breedlove (UCB) Harry J. Carlisle (UCSB)
Website	hubermanlab.com

Andrew David Huberman (born September 26, 1975) is an American neuroscientist and podcaster. He is an associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has hosted the Huberman Lab podcast since 2021; the podcast has attracted criticism for promoting pseudoscientific health claims. He has been a partner, scientific advisor and promoter of dietary supplement companies since 2022.

Early life and education

Huberman was born in 1975 at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California, to Bernardo Huberman, an Argentine physicist and Stanford University professor and his mother, a children's book author. As a child, he was involved in athletics, particularly soccer and swimming, and had a deep curiosity for science and history, often engaging in independent study and sharing knowledge with his peers. He received his early education from Gunn High School.

His parents divorced when he was just 12 years old. After his parents divorce, he disengaged from traditional academics, took up skateboarding, and advocated for community spaces such as Greer Skatepark. He also briefly considered a firefighting career.

After a break from formal education and a reassessment of his interests influenced by therapy and a growing fascination with biopsychology, Huberman resumed his studies and attended Foothill College.

Huberman received a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1998, an M.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Davis, in 2004. For his dissertation, he received Allan G. Marr Prize for Best Ph.D. Dissertation in 2005. He completed his postdoctoral training in neuroscience at Stanford University under Ben Barres between 2006 and 2011. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow. During his postdoctoral work at Stanford, Huberman developed genetic tools to study the visual system and contributed to Thrasher. While at Berkeley, Huberman originally approached Carla J. Shatz to serve as his doctoral advisor; however, she declined the offer, concerned that he had a limited background in molecular and cellular biology and that she would be moving her lab to Harvard. She encouraged Huberman to transfer to UC Davis and reach out to Barbara Chapman.

Academic career

From 2011 to 2015, Huberman was an assistant professor of neurobiology and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. In 2016, Huberman took a faculty position at Stanford University.

With David Spiegel, Huberman has carried out research on cortisol and anxiety-based depression. Huberman has led work investigating the regeneration of eye tissue in mice, which may have a future application in studying optical nerve regeneration in humans. New York Magazine stated that as of 2024, Huberman's lab at Stanford "barely exists", with only a single postdoc working there, with the lab having been scaled back significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. A spokesperson for Huberman said that the lab was still operational.

Podcasts

Huberman was introduced to Robert Mohr in 2019, a New York-based health and fitness publicist who produced "The Fight with Teddy Atlas," a boxing podcast. As the COVID-19 pandemic progressed, Huberman grew dissatisfied with health authorities' narrow focus on the virus without providing guidance for improving public health. Mohr facilitated Huberman's appearances on major podcasts, including those hosted by Joe Rogan and Rich Roll. These appearances helped increase his social media following. By the end of 2020, Huberman had appeared on Lex Fridman's technology podcast. Fridman encouraged him to start his own podcast.

In 2021, with the encouragement of Fridman, Huberman launched the Huberman Lab podcast. In the same year, Huberman and Robert Mohr co-founded Scicomm Media to produce science-related content. In 2023 in Time magazine, Jamie Ducharme described Huberman as having a "massive and dedicated audience" with millions of fans.

Huberman's podcast content is characterstic of pseudoscience, often presenting health claims as scientific when they are in reality insufficiently backed by scientific evidence, or simply wrong. Jonathan Jarry from the Office for Science and Society has questioned Huberman's promotion of "poorly regulated" dietary supplements. According to Jarry, The Huberman Lab podcast has been sponsored by "companies offering questionable products from the perspective of science-based medicine". Joseph Zundell, a cancer biologist, trusts Huberman's expertise in neuroscience but also criticized him for extrapolating animal research for human use without appropriate scientific justification and straying from his area of expertise. These criticisms were echoed by New York Magazine, who stated that Huberman "extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study", though also writing that the podcast "is an expansive, free compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process." Neuroscientist David Berson, who has known Huberman since his postdoctoral research and has been a guest on his podcast, says that Huberman's research is respected among neuroscientists and described his podcast as "a fabulous service for the world" and a way to "open the doors" to the world of science.

As of 2023, the podcast had become the third most popular podcast in the US on Spotify platforms and the most followed show on Apple Podcasts. His YouTube channel has 5.1 million subscribers and his Instagram account has 5.5 million.

Huberman is a proponent of biohacking, which means sticking to a strict daily routine that incorporates exercise and taking dietary supplements to improve one's productivity.

According to an article in Coda, Huberman has promoted anti-sunscreen views on his podcast, saying he's "as scared of sunscreen as I am of melanoma" and claiming that molecules in some types of sunscreen can be found in neurons 10 years after application without providing any evidence. In a 2023 GQ article, Huberman said that he is not a "sunscreen truther" – a term used to describe anti-sunscreen conspiracy theorists.

Awards and recognition

• Cogan Award for Contributions to Vision Science and Ophthalmology (2017)
• Pew Biomedical Scholar Award
• McKnight Neuroscience Scholar Award

Selected publications

• Lim JH, Stafford BK, Nguyen PL, Lien BV, Wang C, Zukor K, He Z, Huberman AD (August 2016). "Neural activity promotes long-distance, target-specific regeneration of adult retinal axons". Nat Neurosci (Research article). 19 (8): 1073–84. doi:10.1038/nn.4340. PMC 5708130. PMID 27399843.
• Balban MY, Neri E, Kogon MM, Weed L, Nouriani B, Jo B, Holl G, Zeitzer JM, Spiegel D, Huberman AD (January 2023). "Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal". Cell Rep Med (Randomized controlled trial). 4 (1): 100895. doi:10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895. PMC 9873947. PMID 36630953.

References

1. "@hubermanlab" (Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.) on Twitter
2. Change Your Brain: Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman | Rich Roll Podcast (Video). July 20, 2020. Event occurs at 2:50. Retrieved December 19, 2022 – via YouTube.
3. ^ Love A (27 March 2024). "So, Should You Trust Andrew Huberman?". Slate.
4. ^ Béchard, Deni Ellis (July 2023). "The Huberman Effect". Stanford Magazine. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
5. Lester Black (June 27, 2023). "How a Stanford professor became one of the world's top podcasters". SFgate.com. Retrieved June 27, 2023.
6. ^ Howley, Kerry (2024-03-25). "Andrew Huberman's Mechanisms of Control". Intelligencer. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
7. ^ Wiseman, Shari (2023). "In conversation with Andrew Huberman". Nature Neuroscience. 26 (8): 1312–1315. doi:10.1038/s41593-023-01395-4. ISSN 1546-1726. PMID 37429915. S2CID 259657196.
8. ^ "Andrew D. Huberman | Stanford Medicine". CAP Profiles (in Samoan). Retrieved 2024-01-10.
9. Barres, Ben (2018). "Ben A. Barres" (PDF). In Albright, Tom; R. Squire, Larry (eds.). The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography. Vol. 10. Society for Neuroscience. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-916110-10-9.
10. "HawkeTalk: The Power of Focus and Passion with Andrew Huberman". CSQ. October 2021.
11. Weintraub, Karen (11 July 2016). "Regrown Brain Cells Give Blind Mice a New View". Scientific American.
12. Barres 2018, p. 45.
13. ^ Ducharme, Jamie (2023-06-28). "How Andrew Huberman Got America to Care About Science". Time. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
14. Jarry, Jonathan (7 April 2023). "Andrew Huberman Has Supplements on the Brain". McGill University Office for Science and Society. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
15. Shapiro, Ariel (2023-11-29). "Apple and Spotify have revealed their top podcasts of 2023. Here is what they do — and don't — tell us". The Verge. Retrieved 2023-12-12.
16. "Apple shares the most popular podcasts of 2023". Apple Newsroom. Retrieved 2023-12-12.
17. Spotify. "Podcast Charts". Podcast Charts. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
18. "Apple Podcasts : United States of America : All Podcasts Podcast Charts - Top". chartable.com. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
19. Silva, Christianna (2023-10-13). "Huberman husbands and the rise of self-optimization". Mashable. Retrieved 2024-02-08.
20. Beres, Derek (October 3, 2023). "The dangerous myths sold by the conspiritualists". Coda.
21. Reiss, Sami (2023). "What's Behind the Rise of the Sunscreen Truther?". GQ. Retrieved 2023-10-06.
22. "The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology- ARVO Awards Recipients: Chronological".
23. "Awardees".

External links

• Official website
• Huberman Lab Podcast
• Andrew D. Huberman at Stanford Medicine

• 1975 births
• Living people
• Scientists from Palo Alto, California
• American neuroscientists
• American podcasters
• American people of Argentine descent
• Foothill College alumni
• University of California, Davis alumni
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• University of California, Santa Barbara alumni
• Stanford University School of Medicine faculty
• University of California, San Diego faculty