Weaving Webs of Silk and Stories

For many people, spiders evoke a blend of unease and fascination. Their eight-legged bodies are the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, their silks are exceptionally strong yet stretchy, and their presence is deeply embedded in stories told across cultures for thousands of years.

Scientists study spiders and their silks to better understand how evolution produced materials that are lightweight, resilient and endlessly adaptable. The scientists use these insights to shape new directions in material science and engineering. At the same time, spiders appear again and again in folklore, serving as teachers, tricksters and symbols of both ingenuity and moral consequence.

What emerges when we approach spiders through the many different lenses through which people have come to view them? And when we take a step back, what ways have these creatures shaped broader science, society and culture?

Join Simons Society of Fellows Junior Fellow and physicist Ella King, American Museum of Natural History Provost of Science and Curator of Invertebrate Zoology Cheryl Hayashi, and astrophysicist and folklorist Moiya McTier for a conversation all about spiders. Moderated by Science Friday host Flora Lichtman, this event will explore the spider as both a scientific marvel and an enduring figure in culture and folklore.

King is an incoming assistant professor at Northwestern University in the departments of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Soft Matter Research at New York University, where she works with David Grier. She received her Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University, advised by Michael Brenner. For her Ph.D., she developed inverse design methods for bio-inspired and non-equilibrium self-assembling materials, demonstrating for the first time how to directly and simultaneously design kinetics and structure in self-assembly. She also built theoretical tools that extract more information from existing experimental data, including methods for inferring interaction potentials from particle trajectories and for tracking particles with correlated motion. King’s work spans soft matter physics, materials design and biological physics.

Hayashi is the provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She also works at the Richard Gilder Graduate School as a professor, a curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology and as the Leon Hess Director of Comparative Biology Research. Previously, she was a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside. Hayashi is an expert on spider silks, investigating the characteristics of these remarkable biological materials and their genomic basis. She earned her Ph.D. in biology from Yale University and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her cross-disciplinary work studying the structure, function and evolutionary genetics of spider silks.

McTier is an astrophysicist and folklorist based in NYC. Since graduating from Harvard and Columbia, Moiya has given hundreds of talks around the world, helped design exhibits for museums and art galleries, and consulted with Disney to make their fictional settings feel more real. Moiya shares her unique perspective on the universe through her astronomy podcast, “Pale Blue Pod,” and her debut book, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. Her next book, Mothers of Invention, which explores the history of creativity, is slated for release in August 2026.

Lichtman is a host of Science Friday, a science show broadcast nationally on over 500 public radio stations and available on all podcast platforms. Flora previously created and hosted Gimlet’s Every Little Thing, a listener call-in podcast that ran for 200 episodes, averaging 1 million monthly downloads. She was nominated for an Emmy for her writing on Netflix’s Bill Nye Saves the World, and again for the New York Times Op-Docs video series she co-directed, Animated Life. She got her start at a NATO oceanographic lab in Italy, where she sailed around the Mediterranean looking for whales.