Podcaster Alie Ward didn’t draw the usual crowd one might expect at a college talk about science. “Rather than quiet, stiff intellectuals sitting back in their chairs, Weinstein auditorium hummed with the voices of excited students. The talk was part of the Weurtle Center’s Amplify program – a series of events designed to promote curiosity and leadership.
Wurtele Center for Collaborative Leadership director Erin Cohn emerged on stage as an enthusiastic opener. She held the mic close and gave Ward a heartfelt introduction.
“Alie is an honorary Smithie in her proud nerdiness, in her heartfelt conscientiousness,” said Cohn. The crowd tittered in agreement. “I’m super excited to have her today as a model of a form of leadership that might not fit into the traditional world.”
The lights dimmed, and Ward, anxiously anticipated, stepped onto the stage. Students applauded thunderously, a cult-level commotion usually reserved for grunge concert pits or long-awaited movie premieres. It’s a level of fangirling Smith students do best. And Ward has captured it not through a WOZQ band or Campus Center party, but through science.
In her critically acclaimed “Ologies” podcast, Ward interviews specialists, or “ologists,” in every imaginable area of study, from lepidopterology (the study of butterflies) to kalology (the study of beauty standards).
Brooke Te ‘26 is a self-proclaimed Ologies fangirl. She started listening to the podcast during the pandemic. Te stood at the tail end of a winding line of students waiting to talk to Ward after her “Magic of Curiosity” event.
“Alie asks really good questions,” Te said. She reflected on one episode about horology, the study of watches, which is a topic she never ordinarily would have thought about. “Listening to her talk about it, she made it sound so cool, and I learned so much, and I never knew (about) all those tiny parts and keeping them clean.”
“Her curiosity is truly infectious,” Te concluded.
Te was thrilled when she learned Ward was coming to give a talk at Smith. She was disappointed when she saw tickets were already sold out, but her friend encouraged her to show up regardless. Te did, and it paid off — she said she took a leaf out of Ward’s book.
“A friend was like, oh my gosh, you just need to come, you just need to show up,” she said, “And hey, they were right. So that was very exciting. I feel like it very much so… followed the Alie advice of sometimes you just got to do the scary thing.”
Ward is always pushing to do the scary thing. Starting Ologies, she said, was very scary.
She introduced Ologies’ origin story by putting a close shot of herself sobbing at the camera onto the large screen behind her.
“This was me before I started, by the way,” she said to the audience. Ward explained that she hit a breaking point in her career in 2013; she was no longer pursuing her true passion, science, and she was experiencing difficulties in her personal life.
On the outside, however, Ward appeared to be doing great. After studying science and film in college, she worked her way up in the television industry, forming connections by catering for film crews at odd hours.
In 2013, Ward was a contributor to the Cooking Channel’s “Unique Sweets.” She’d succeeded in securing her position as a television personality, but something was missing. So Ward started volunteering at Los Angeles’ National History Museum, and it sparked an interest in science — specifically the study of insects — that she thought she had forgotten. It’s where she decided to make her dream for Ologies come to life.
Ward launched Ologies in 2017. Despite having seven or eight episodes lined up, Ward was terrified to release them. “I had a trailer but I just wasn’t ready to launch yet,” she said in an interview with The Sophian. “Because I was feeling like, what if I launch and it doesn’t succeed? And then this thing I’ve wanted to do forever, my opportunity is lost.”
Hearing someone else was also thinking about starting an Ologies series was the push she needed to release the episodes. Her experience is rooted in bravery, a topic Ward says she never wants to stop learning about.
“I feel like bravery is at the heart of so much of what we’re willing to do and what we’re willing to explore and what we’re willing to learn, and how we’re willing to fail,” Ward said.
During her talk, Ward urged students to learn from her experiences and embrace the possibility of failure, no matter how scary it is. It’s necessary, she says, to chase what you truly care about.
“I wanted to (start Ologies) for so long, and I procrastinated,” Ward reflected, “I put it off, and I had a fear of failure and a fear of perfection and all these things. And I didn’t ever imagine that we would get to touch so many people and ask so many questions, and that I would get to make curiosity my job for real.”
Ward’s curiosity lights up the stories she tells on Ologies. “All these jobs that are so central to my own curiosity, I get to ask people questions. They’ve done amazing things, and I get to be a proxy for my audience. And I get to ask the questions that hopefully you’re thinking too, right?” she said.
Ward urges people to chase their own childlike curiosity: “You have to go back to a time in your life when you weren’t so self conscious about your own identity and you just got to be you.”
She reflected on her “free range” childhood growing up on the cow-field-outskirts of Sacramento, where she spent her time dipping into creeks and poking cow patties, clipboard in hand.
Ward’s curiosity on Ologies inspired Maddy Scholz ‘28 and Weina Lu ‘28. The two went to a lesson in making field guides that Ward hosted after her “Magic of Curiosity” talk. 17 students attended, sitting at round tables in the workshop room of Kathleen McCartney Hall. They filled in a blank visual field guide template with their own interests, and considered how Ward humanizes science.
“The point of science is to understand the world better from a human perspective,” said Lu, a neuroscience major. “That’s the beauty of life. You can’t just, like, sit in a dark room,” she said, “You’re going to be in a community. You’re going to be interacting with others. It’s important for you to build this community rather than harm it.”
In many ways, Ologies itself is a field guide to innumerable scientific pursuits. Ward described wading through the water in Hawaii with squid researcher Dr. Sarah McNulty at midnight, looking for the nearly invisible, glittering bobtail squid.
“And again, she’s like, never happier,” Ward told students, grinning, “She’s obsessed with squid. Her car is a squid mobile. She wrote squid mobile all over it in paint pen. Her license plate says: ‘Squids.’ And this is what she’s most curious about, and she’s willing to do so much in order to follow that passion.”
Ward isn’t afraid to wield humor to humanize scientists and capture attention. She uses it in her own bio, describing herself on her website as: “Science communicator. Podcaster. Elective Redhead.”
The redheaded label came by accident. Ward described herself as having been a proto-emo teenager. After dying her hair with black box dye for years, she tried to lighten it, only to be left with an orangey hue that she decided to commit to.
Growing up in the stifling suburbs of San Francisco, Ward raged against the machine in her own nerdy way. “Sort of imagine someone with, like, eyeliner over their face,” Ward said, describing her teenage self. “But being, like, straight edge, designated driver.” She listened to Skinny Puppy, The Cure, and KMFDM. Today, she favors Ethel Cain and Haute & Freddy.
She liked the goth aesthetic, she said, because in the goth world it’s okay to not be what people expect. Her anti-establishment origins make sense. In adulthood, she’s continued to push people to question the system.
In her recent September episode Revolutionologies, Ward interviewed revolutionary expert Jack Goldstone. “If you’re like, ‘Alison, I better not get any politics in my science program,’ I do think that you should leave,” Ward says at the outset of the episode.
In the episode, Ward and Goldstone discussed what leads to a successful revolution, and instructed listeners not to throw out their protest signs. Successful peaceful protest is the result of months-long weekly protests, Goldstone said, rather than one-off events.
Above all, Ward considers Ologies to be a platform for the specialists it hosts.
“My intrinsic motivation for doing Ologies was to make ologists like rock stars,” Ward said, “To put these people on a pedestal and go, ‘Woah, what’s your story? Like, this is really cool. Like that’s aspirational, doing field work in the middle of the night with goggles on and figuring out endangered species.”
One thing is clear, talking to Smith students: Ward is their nerdy, funny rockstar.
