About OpenLab
Every breakthrough has a story, and it's often the same one: someone from the wrong field made the right observation.
OpenLab is Stanford's meta-disciplinary research lab; a deliberate experiment in serendipity, cross-pollination, and academic freedom. While traditional departments organize by similarity (geneticists with geneticists, economists with economists), we organize by difference. Here, talented researchers from intentionally unrelated fields—from law to fashion design, theology to engineering—share the same physical space. Crucially, our researchers don't necessarily do interdisciplinary research, they do disciplinary research in an environment where their daily conversations happen with people trained to think nothing like them.
Our structure mirrors our ethos of thoughtful disobedience. Just as we reject departmental restrictions, we reject the unwritten rules that constrain research. We take brilliant thinkers who don't fit the mold, and prefer the dropout genius over the pedigreed mediocrity. We defend the freedom to investigate ideas that make powerful people uncomfortable. We study what others call forbidden, fund what others call impossible, and protect what others call dangerous.
This should not be interpreted as reckless. It's intended to recognize that the most important research often push the boundaries of social, academic, or intuitive norms before it changes them. A heliocentric solar system was heretical before it was foundational. Encryption was subversive before it became essential. Today's uncomfortable truth is tomorrow's conventional wisdom, but this requires people willing to pursue it while it's still unpopular.
Our researchers aren't encouraged to chase tenure or citations. Instead, they build prototypes that might fail spectacularly. They ask questions that could end careers elsewhere. They operate from first principles rather than institutional permission. When an engineer's moonshot meets a philosopher's paradox in our hallway, when an artist's aesthetic framework reshapes a mathematician's proof, when contrarian minds from incompatible fields collide daily... that's where both structural and intellectual rebellion create breakthrough.
We are here because the type of lab that shouldn't exist just might discover what shouldn't be possible.
Welcome to the wrong room.
Supporters and Collaborators
Want to help support OpenLab?
Contact: Reuben Youngblom [ryoungbl@stanford.edu]; or:
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