Ogbunu

“Does a computer chip have an astrology?” © Styles P

Keywords: Science of science; science, technology and society; social inequality; afro-futurism.

In addition to my basic science program, I operate a research program at the intersection between science, data, and culture. In this realm, I study the bi-directional relationship between the scientific process and the world in which it is embedded. To this end, I author a range of products: data-driven stories of social phenomena, technical perspectives on topics related to science and society, commentaries on issues of social import, teaching tools, and others—all towards democratizing science in a way that everyone can have access to the benefits of basic science.

Importantly, I formally study cultural evolution in the form of investigating cultural relics, art, music, speculative fiction, and other realms. 

Below I will provide a list of selected popular writing products that have appeared across a number of venues and publications. 

Regular contributor positions

• Columnist, Undark [2024–present]
• Ideas contributor, WIRED [2019 –present]
• Contributor, Andscape [2019 – 2023]
• Contributing columnist, Quanta Magazine [2023 – 2024]

Contributions to Harvard Public Health Magazine

• “When Death Doesn’t Count.” [January 2024]
• “Data Availability is Social Justice.” [October 2023]

Contributions to Quanta Magazine [2023 – present]

• “The New Quest to Control Evolution.” [November 2023]
• “How Genetic Surprises Complicate the Old Doctrine of DNA.” [August 2023]

Contributions to Undark [Jan 2019 – Present]

• “Metascience is more important now than ever.” [July 2025]
• “The Many Perils of the Pivot Penalty.” [July 2025]
• “How ‘The Dawn of Everything’ speaks to the current moment.” [May 2025]
• “The ripple effects of a shrinking American science.” [May 2025]
• “Now is the time for a COVID-19 synthesis.” [April 2025]
• “How science can adapt to a new normal.” [March 2025]
• “The end of science’s peacetime.” [February 2025]
• “How do we democratize science?” [January 2025]
• “What does it mean to be in a post-genomics age?” [December 2024]
• “The Nobel Prizes tell a story about scientific discovery.” [November 2024]
• “In the new authoritarian war on ideas, biology might be next.” [October 2024]
• “Searching for the fundamental stuff of life.” [September 2024]
• “Research parasites in the age of AI.” [August 2024]
• “The Misplaced incentives in academic publishing.” [July 2024]
• “A Classic Study of Evolution, and Why it Matters.” [September 2023]
• “ChatGPT isn’t ‘hallucinating’. It’s Bullshitting.” [April 2023]
• “Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us. We Can Put Them to Rest.” [December 2022]
• “The Coronavirus Is Mutating. That’s Not Necessarily Good or Bad.” [May 2020]

“The complex future of work means everyone will need a diverse skillset.” Fast Company. [May 2024]

“Hunched Over in a Shrinking World.” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s What’s Next Health? [February 2023]

“Go Ahead, Joke about the Pandemic,” The Atlantic Monthly, [November 2022]

Contributing Editor, WNYC’s RADIOLAB [May 2021 – May 2023]

Contributions to WIRED [Jan 2019 – Present]

• “Social media replaced Zines. Now Zines are taking the power back.” [June 2025]
• “Music can thrive in the AI era.” [December 2024]
• “Technology has transformed Rap Beef.” [May 2024]
• “Nas’ Illmatic was the Beginning of the End of the Album.” [April 2024]
• “Hip-Hop, 2073.” [August 2023]
• “Quashing Racist Pseudoscience Is Science’s Responsibility” [May 2022]
• “What are you going to tweet after you die?” [November 2021]
• “What makes an Artist in the Age of Algorithms?” [September 2021]
• “STEM’s Racial Reckoning Just Entered Its Most Crucial Phase.” [May 2021]
• “Scientists Need to Admit What They Got Wrong About Covid.” [April 2021]
• “White Nationalism is Worse than a Disease”, [January 2021]
• “Yes, Accept the Flaws of Election and Epidemic Models.” [November 2020]
• “The Science That Spans #MeToo, Memes, and Covid-19.” [October 2020]
• “The Flagrant Hypocrisy of Bungled College Reopenings.” [September 2020]
• “Calling Bullshit Skewers the World’s BS Merchants.” [August 2020]
• “How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend.” [July 2020]
• “Why Juneteenth Went Viral.” [June 2020]
• “The Pandemic and the Protests Are Mirror Images.” [June 2020]
• “How to spot a Covid-19 Carpetbagger, and an Expert.” [April 2020]
• “How social distancing became social justice.” [March 2020]
• “How white nationalists have co-opted fan fiction.” [August 2019]
• “James Watson and the insidiousness of scientific racism.” [Jan 2019]

Contributions to ESPN’s The Undefeated/Andscape [Jan 2020 – 2023]

• “Nnedi Okorafor, a pioneer of Africanfuturism, doesn’t want her work put in a box.” [November 2023]
• “Verbal Armageddon: A story of hip-hop at an HBCU, 25 years later.” [August 2023]
• “Study on COVID-19, race and prison populations shows the power of ‘big data’’ in the fight for equality.” [April 2023]
• “New data reveals how #OscarsSoWhite changed the Academy Awards.” [March 2022]
• “30 years after Magic’s diagnosis, a look at the intersection of hip-hop and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.” [November 2021]
• “From ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ to ‘Fear of a Black Universe.” [November 2021]
• “Are the #EmmysSoWhite? It’s Complicated.” [September 2021]
• “One year after the bubble, the NBA’s COVID-19 response is helping the world understand the pandemic.” [September 2021]
• “#TheOscarsAreStillSoWhite.” [April 2021]
• “Can the NBA win its rematch with COVID-19?” [December 2020]
• “How the NBA conquered COVID-19.” [October 2020]
• “Howard alum Chadwick Boseman captured what it meant to be Black and excellent.” [September 2020]
• “The NBA bubble is a grand experiment in epidemiology.” [July 2020]
• “How Coronavirus compares to MRSA.” [March 2020]
• “Katherine Johnson Taught Us About Erasure.” [February 2020]
• “Can Artificial Intelligence Help Us, Understand Racial Bias in Sports?” [January 2020]

Contributions to Scientific American

• “AI will turn our lives into the Truman Show.” [December 2024]
• “Social Media is Junk Food for Information Forages.” [July 2024]
• “Nobel Prize Debate Misses the Mark on the Real Culprits Ignoring Scientific Merit.” [October 2023]
• “The Human Genome and the Making of a Skeptical Biologist.” [February 2021]
• “For Scientific Institutions, Racial Reconciliation Requires Reparations.” [June 2020]

Contributions to Genes to Genomes (from the Genetics Society of America)

• “Gabbing on Gattaca.” [October 2022]
• “The population genetics of microbial moonwalking.” [September 2022]
• “One life, many ideas: A centennial homage to John Maynard Smith.” [April 2020]
• “Coffee and epistasis: A scientific story of sips and SNPs.” [June 2019]

Content Contributor, 0.1%: Genomics x Identity. Race. Gender. Politics. Navel x Massive Science. [November 2019]

Book review in Boston Review

• “Is there a human blueprint?” [August 2019]

Essay in The Conversation

• “Why it’s so difficult for scientists to predict the next outbreak of a dangerous disease.” [February 2019]

Book review for Greater Good Magazine

• “Why do people do bad things? A Review of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave.” [December 2018]

Contributor, Deadspin

• “After Jackie Robinson bent baseball’s color barrier, two journeymen broke it for good.” [April 2019]
• “Which baseball legends had two separate hall-of-fame careers?” [July 2017]
• “What makes a slam dunk contest champ?” [February 2017]