Graduate research, served conversationally.
PhDrinking is a research interview show hosted by Sadie Witkowski, built around graduate students and researchers explaining their work in plain conversation. The tone is relaxed but curious, moving from strange personal facts and drink choices into sleep, sustainability, replication, psychedelics, coral health, learning, and birds.
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PhDrinking makes graduate research feel conversational without turning it into trivia. Sadie Witkowski hosts interviews with graduate students, postdocs, and researchers from a range of fields, and the show often starts far from the formal abstract. A guest may bring a fact about Erasmus Darwin’s poetry, a cat that follows on walks, Disney laundry, vultures using iron-rich soil, or a punk-band past. Then the conversation settles into the work. The recent excerpts move through sleep and memory, eco-villages and sustainable lifestyles, psychedelic and consciousness research, replication in statistics, ocean acidification and corals, learning sciences, genetics-department lab life, and ornithology-adjacent bird talk. That range is the point. PhDrinking is less a lecture series than a guided look at what researchers sound like when they are allowed to explain, hesitate, revise, and get excited. The show makes room for methods and uncertainty. Slow-wave sleep becomes waves of activity carrying information through the brain. Replication becomes a question of definitions, statistical properties, and what scientists mean when they say a finding holds up. Sustainability becomes a lived problem of communities trying to build coherent ecological habits and sometimes struggling to last. Coral science becomes chemistry, pH, skeleton-building, and the consequences of more CO2 in seawater. The drinking conceit gives the show a casual ritual, but it does not replace the research. Sadie’s role is to keep the exchange friendly, specific, and intelligible. She asks the follow-up a non-specialist might need, then lets the guest keep the texture of their field. The result is a show for people who like science with the edges left on: not overproduced, not overpolished, and not afraid of the way real academic conversations wander before they land.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants accessible research talk with the texture of real graduate-school conversation. Best for someone comfortable moving from casual anecdotes into technical ideas.
What sets it apart: PhDrinking stands out by mixing a social drinking ritual and weird-fact opener with serious research explanation across many fields. It keeps the human messiness of academic work visible instead of sanding every topic into a lecture.
Podcast by PhDrinking
The coral scientist sang in a punk band; you still get the ocean chemistry.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A format flip leads into sleep science, pandemic routines, and one cat's poorly timed Zoom habit.
Sadie Witkowski turns the usual format around here, shifting from interviews with graduate students to a conversation with Katie Wu, a freelance science writer who works primarily with Smithsonian Magazine and has a microbiology degree.
A beer-fueled conversation about why sustainable communities attract people, and why lasting together is harder than the ideal suggests.
A beer in Germany leads into a grounded conversation about sustainable living as something people try to build together, not just imagine from a distance.
A candid, grounded conversation about psychedelic research, episodic memory, and the methods scientists learn to use.
pH Drinking opens loosely, with Manoj Das walking his cat, before settling into a more serious conversation about psychedelic research. Das, a postdoc researcher in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Hopkins University, talks about people from every stripe…
A clear, personable conversation about why replication claims depend on the definitions beneath them.
PhDrinking turns the replication crisis into a careful conversation about definitions, methods, and the limits of scary-sounding percentages. Sarah Peckosweiser, a fifth-year graduate student in Northwestern's statistics department, explains why claims about failed replication…
A relaxed, beer-adjacent conversation about CO2, ocean acidification, and coral reef chemistry.
Sadie Witkowski gives coral reefs a warm, approachable frame in conversation with Chris Wall, a post-doctoral researcher who recently completed his PhD in the Pacific Biosciences Department at the University of Hawaii.
Research findings, translated for real-world stakes.
Particle accelerators, compost piles and Queen's guitarist, all explained.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Katie Wu says a 90-minute nap with targeted memory reactivation made people worse at remembering the exact painting slice they had studied.
PhDrinking's "Sustainable Sipping" follows Alia Morris, a third-year Environmental Sciences and Policy graduate student at Central European University, as she explains eco-villages from her Mexico fieldwork.
["PhDrinking's 'Tipsy or Tripping?' pairs Sadie Witkowski with Manoj Das, a postdoc at Hopkins University's Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.", "Das says he studies episodic memory, false memory, and drug effects across alcohol, THC, benzodiazepines, Ambien/Zolpidem, GHB, and psilocybin.", "He describes retrograde facilitation, where alcohol or Zolpidem given after study can improve later memory, while THC and GHB do not show the same pattern.", "He also lays out the DEA, FDA, and IRB hurdles for psilocybin work and walks through false-memory tasks like DRM and misinformation paradigms."]
PhDrinking host Sadie Witkowski interviews Sarah Peckosweiser, a fifth-year Northwestern statistics graduate student, and starts with a joke about Sarah using her PhD to work at Bravo.
Chris Wall opens pH Drinking by saying he sang in A&S, a skate rock hardcore punk band he played in during undergrad and graduate school.
Bianca Sharman’s PhD at the University of Amsterdam examines “fashion as moving image” across roughly 130 years of cultural production.
Northwestern graduate student Andrew Hall describes the Big Five as more scientifically grounded than Myers-Briggs, which assigns people to types.
Northwestern psychology graduate student Nikita Salovich studies how people evaluate inaccurate information, including fake Amazon reviews.
Host Sadie Witkowski interviews graduate student Amrita Anand about her research in genetics and her quirky habit of aligning things.
Host Sadie Witkowski interviews graduate student Sarah White about her research in Learning Sciences, starting with a Disney laundry fact and a beer toast.
Host Sadie Witkowski interviews biology graduate student Brianna Bennett about her research and a random bird fact about bearded vultures.
Host Sadie Witkowski interviews plant biology graduate Rishi Masalia about his research and a weird fact about banana flavoring.
Host interviews a graduate student about astronomy research, starting with a weird fact about alcohol clouds in space.
Host Sadie Witkowski interviews graduate student Heather Shire about her random weird fact: the bizarre journey of Napoleon's severed penis.
Host Sadie Witkowski interviews postdoc Corey Inman about his research background and current work in neurosurgery, with casual conversation over drinks.
Host Sadie Witkowski interviews graduate student Molly Edwards about her research while they enjoy drinks.