VIDEO - Studying scientists at MIT

Pierre Azoulay, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is turning the tables on scientists. He studies how life scientists work. What type of grants lead to the most creative research? When elite scientists die or switch jobs, what happens to the output of their former collaborators? Information about these questions is just not readily available. Except to Azoulay: The hard numbers supporting his findings come from a unique database charting the careers of 12,000 scientific stars, which he has built up over nearly a decade in collaboration with Joshua Graff Zivin, an economist at the University of California at San Diego.