Episoder
-
Armin Lak is a neuroscientist and is a Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the University of Oxford, studying the neuronal circuits that govern learning and decision making. In particular, his research focuses on the role of dopaminergic neurons in different types of decision making through a combination of state-of-the-art neuronal circuit tools with novel behavioural methods and computational models.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:35) β Most beautiful aspect about biology
(09:32) β Dopamine
(11:34) β Reward prediction error hypothesis
(22:41) β Decision making
(33:41) β Incentive salience theory
(39:04) β Computing value in the brain
(44:10) β Experimental and computational techniques
(50:42) β What is the right level of explanation
(53:18) β Favourite part about doing science
(55:04) β Wolfram Schultz
(57:49) β Advice for young scientists
-
Chaitanya Gokhale is a research group leader in theoretical eco-evolutionary dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. His lab uses theoretical biology to elucidate the associations and interactions that power emergent complexity at multiple scales.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:35) β Natural and synthetic gene drives
(08:54) β Population dynamics of gene drives
(14:50) β Mating complexity on gene drive dynamics
(28:00) Evolutionary game theory
(41:38) Single games vs multiple games
(56:44) β Mutualism
(1:07:00) β Origin of his interest in theoretical biology
(1:16:13) β Advice for aspiring scientists
-
Manglende episoder?
-
Oriel FeldmanHall is the Alfred Manning Associate Professor of Cognitive, Linguistics and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Her research focuses on studying the neural basis of moral decision making, altruism, and socio-emotional decision making. Specifically, she uses techniques from different fields like behavioural economics, social psychology, imaging and psychophysiology to disentangle the cognitive and neural processes behind the complex choices that shape human social behaviour.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:45) β What is morality
(03:21) β Why do humans have morality
(08:40) β Neurobiology of moral decision making
(19:53) β Studying moral decision making
(32:36) β What is the right level of explanation
(33:58) β Engineering morality
(35:54) β Orielβs journey in science
(41:08) β Advice for young scientists
-
Adam Packer is a neuroscientist and a Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the University of Oxford. He has helped pioneered all-optical interrogation techniques that allow simultaneous manipulation and recording of neural circuit activity with cellular resolution in vivo, and his research focuses on using these techniques to investigate how complex spatiotemporal activity patterns in neural circuits drive behaviour.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:40) β Most beautiful aspect of biology
(02:26) β What is the right level of explanation
(06:45) β Measuring neural activity
(17:38) β Manipulating neural activity
(21:35) β Optogenetics
(27:10) β Determining causality
(37:44) β Using light to measure and manipulate neural activity
(49:32) β Voltage imaging
(53:24) β New insights
(55:06) β Adamβs journey in science
(1:03:28) β Consciousness
(1:05:18) β Theory in neuroscience
(1:07:19) β Progress in neuroscience
(1:08:14) β Advice for young scientists
-
Christopher McFarland is an Assistant Professor in Genetics and Genome Science at Case Western Reserve University. His lab integrates evolutionary theory with quantitative experimentation to better understand tumour biology.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:28) β Relevance of evolution to cancer
(03:00) β Genome instability in cancer development
(05:14) β Accumulation of deleterious mutations in cancer
(15:50) β Comparison with older ideas in cancer biology
(22:17) β Experimental study of tumour evolution
(35:33) β Cancer therapeutics and treatment
(47:41) β Main challenges for the cancer biology field
(54:49) β His career journey and advice for young scientists
-
Will Ratcliff is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. His lab combines mathematical modelling, synthetic biology and experimental evolution, in particular long term evolution experiments (LTEEs), to study the evolution of multicellularity and the spatial dynamics of microbial social interactions.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:31) β Categorisation of multicellularity
(12:04) β Selection pressure for multicellularity in aggregative organisms
(19:40) β Darwinian definition of individuality
(23:22) β Experimental study of selection for multicellularity and LTEE
(44:50) β Entanglement in biology
(48:57) β Is it easy to evolve multicellular life?
(58:47) β Using phylogenetic trees
(1:07:37) β Microbial social interactions and their spatial dynamics
(1:17:25) β Discussion of the article 'Bacterial species rarely work together'
(1:28:33) β Advice for young scientists
NOTES
Free version of the book on evolution of multicellularity: https://t.co/CDQdyW1lXZ
MuLTEE thread: https://twitter.com/wc_ratcliff/status/1423359901766602755?s=20&t=UrBEBZZMZQCjeHaw-0vCyg
New paper examining clonal development and aggregation directly: https://twitter.com/wc_ratcliff/status/1550585020376649729?s=20&t=UrBEBZZMZQCjeHaw-0vCyg
Guide to public speaking: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j4U4VjoTOK5tQLoLxr4W7qfwa35Yy2Dv/view?usp=sharing
The article we discussed on bacterial social interactions: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn5093
-
Tristram Wyatt is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. His research focuses on the evolution of pheromones, these chemical signals transmitted between animals of the same species, influencing social behaviour. Tristram is also an award-winning author, with his Cambridge University Press book on Pheromones and Animal Behaviour winning the Best Postgraduate Textbook Award of the Royal Society of Biology in 2014.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:45) β Odor detection
(13:59) β Pheromones
(37:33) β Human pheromones
(54:47) β Storytelling in science
(1:05:07) β Advice for young scientists
-
Greg Pask is an insect neurobiologist at Middlebury College studying how insects use smell to communicate with each other. In particular, his research focuses on using a range of techniques in molecular biology, genetics, electrophysiology and animal behaviour to understand the mechanisms by which ants detect social cues and how this is necessary for maintaining successful ant colonies.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:35) β Superorganisms
(17:25) β Division of labour in ant colonies
(22:14) β How ants communicate
(31:47) β Studying ants in the lab
(50:42) β How much we know about ant neurobiology
(53:26) β Automated recording of ant behaviour
(1:02:51) β Other insects
(1:04:53) β Gregβs scientific journey
(1:10:23) β Favourite part about doing science
(1:15:34) β Beauty of evolution
(1:17:47) Advice for young scientists
-
Lisa Monteggia is the Barlow Family Director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and Professor of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders like depression, uncovering the mechanisms by which traditional antidepressants like SSRIs exert their antidepressant response and uncovering how exactly more recent antidepressants like ketamine are able to produce an antidepressant response so quickly.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:43) β Depression
(02:22) β History of depression
(07:25) β Causes of depression
(15:11) β SSRIs and neurotrophins
(23:33) β Ketamine
(45:30) β Does ketamine fix underlying pathophysiologies?
(59:02) β Experimental challenges
(1:00:36) β Psychopharmacology
(1:02:13) β Advice for young scientists
-
Elizabeth Bonawitz is the David J. Vitale Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Harvard University, studying the psychological and computational mechanisms underlying the learning of causal beliefs. In particular, her research combines cognitive development experiments with computational modeling to study the structure of childrenβs early causal beliefs, how evidence and prior beliefs interact to affect childrenβs learning and memory, and how this is affected by social factors, with the broader goal of informing educational practice.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:42) β Causal reasoning
(05:16) β How children learn about causality
(28:08) β How is knowledge structured
(33:23) β Levels of explanation
(36:55) β Studying causal beliefs experimentally
(42:13) β Using computational models
(47:57) β Problems in the education system
(56:39) β Advice for young scientists
-
Jose Jimenez is a Senior Lecturer in Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London, whose research occurs at the interface of synthetic biology and evolution. His lab is interested in how evolution shapes the properties of proteins exhibiting quantum mechanisms, cell economics, and the dynamics of complex microbial communities. The applications of this research range from the development of novel methods to fight antibiotic resistance, to the use of engineered microorganisms for the upcycling of plastic waste.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:48) β What is quantum biology?
(07:28) β Investigating the evolution of quantum systems in biology
(11:28) β Quantum biology and synthetic biology
(14:56) β What can quantum biology explain?
(20:00) β What is cell economics?
(27:10) β Feedback control to reduce the cost of protein synthesis
(32:45) β Cell economics and fundamental biology
(36:50) β Bacterial bet-hedging
(39:07) β Microbial communities in synthetic biology
(46:48) β Potential of manipulating microbial social interactions
(51:28) β Jose's research interests
(56:19) β The landscape of synthetic biology - academia vs industry
(1:03:31) β Advice for young scientists
-
Ian Maze is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Neuroscience and Pharmacological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His research involves studying the chromatin-based mechanisms of adult cognitive and psychiatric disorders like addiction and major depression, in particular how monoamines like serotonin and dopamine can act as epigenetic regulators to influence gene expression, and the implications in disease and treatment.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:42) β Epigenetics
(15:20) β Serotonin and depression
(18:42) β Serotonylation
(36:20) β Depression and epigenetics
(40:12) β Dopaminylation
(42:20) β Studying epigenetics of psychiatric disorders
(48:48) β Future of depression diagnosis and treatment
(51:40) β Ianβs academic journey
(57:00) β Advice for young scientists
-
Jenny Saffran is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying how infants use statistical learning β the detection of pattern and regularities in the environment, to learn about the structure of language. Language learning is a highly complex problem and is not a trivial task for an infant, but behavioral experiments from Jennyβs labs have led to many insights into how infants solve this task.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:38) β What is language
(08:33) β Structure of human languages
(19:58) β Language and intelligence
(23:57) β Is language innate
(40:44) β How babies learn language
(57:10) β Learning different languages
(1:07:12) β Psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists
(1:10:21) β Studying language in babies
(1:15:33) β Jennyβs academic journey
(1:23:30) β Natural language processing
(1:31:44) β Advice for young scientists
NOTES
Seeing faces is necessary for face-patch formation (Arcaro et al., 2017)
-
Irene Tracey is a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, using neuroimaging tools to study the neurobiological mechanisms of pain perception in acute and chronic pain, as well how states of consciousness are altered with anaesthetics. Until recently, she held the Nuffield Chair of Anaesthetic Sciences, and was Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Director of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain. She is currently the Warden of Merton College in Oxford and has recently been appointed CBE for her services to medical research.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:48) β Why we feel pain
(06:09) β Mechanisms of pain perception
(17:54) β Modulating pain perception
(22:37) β Pain tolerance
(26:07) β Chronic pain
(32:39) β Studying pain experimentally
(46:14) β Empathy
(48:57) β Advice for young scientists
-
Kent Berridge is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, studying the neurobiology and brain systems underlying psychological processes like motivation, pleasure, craving, and addiction. His research has shown a dissociation between reward liking and reward wanting, and has led him to propose the Incentive Salience Hypothesis of dopamine, which states that dopamine mediates wanting and craving but not liking and pleasure. Contrary to popular belief, dopamine is not a pleasure molecule, and its psychological function remains highly controversial.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:51) β Dopamine
(02:59) β Is dopamine a pleasure molecule?
(09:11) β Liking vs wanting
(15:03) β Incentive Salience Theory
(18:22) β Dopamine and learning
(33:59) β Neurobiology and evolution of pleasure
(41:14) β Why people have different preferences
(45:09) β Experimental techniques and challenges
(51:05) β Pleasure in life
(54:26) β Advice for young scientists
-
Juan Caicedo is a Schmidt Fellow and computer scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, working at the intersection of biology and machine learning. His research involves the use of deep learning and machine learning approaches to analyze microscopy images and genetic data for decoding cellular phenotypes and their interactions in order to gain deeper insights into basic cell biology, how disease affects cells, and to test different types of treatments in a high-throughput manner.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:45) β Image-based profiling
(26:15) β Algorithms for cell image segmentation
(59:10) β Characterizing cell phenotypes
(1:06:48) β Imaging interactions between cells
(1:11:19) β Cancer
(1:16:26) β Future of personalized medicine
(1:20:27) β Advice for young scientists
-
Randy Gallistel is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, studying the cellular substrate of learning and memory. He is one of the biggest critics of the mainstream hypothesis that synaptic plasticity is the neurobiological basis of memory, and has argued for the cell-intrinsic hypothesis of memory storage β the idea that memory is stored in intracellular molecules.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:36) β Memory and computation
(24:42) β Critique of the synaptic plasticity hypothesis of memory
(41:48) β Number coding
(55:48) β Computational theory of mind vs Connectionism
(01:08:54) β The synaptic plasticity debate
(1:26:15) β Cell-intrinsic hypothesis of memory storage
(2:16:30) β Resistance against the cell-intrinsic hypothesis
(2:31:57) β Neural networks
(2:40:56) β Favourite part of science
(2:46:12) β Meaning of life
(2:47:18) β Advice for young scientists
NOTES
Hessameddin Akhlaghpour's paper showing RNA can be a computation system: An RNA-based theory of natural universal computation
Book about information theory β Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code -
Kate Jeffery is a Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London, researching how the brain assembles sensory information into an internal representation of space for navigation. Her current research focuses on how the brain represents complex space like three dimensional space, as well as the internal sense of direction. She founded and is currently the director of the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at UCL, and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and the Royal Institute of Navigation.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:48) β Entropy and life
(05:58) β Evolutionary transitions
(19:36) β Evolution of spatial navigation
(22:37) β Discovering the neural representations of space
(35:54) β Spatial maps
(1:05:25) β Mapping 3D space
(1:30:35) β Mapping arbitrary dimensions
(1:36:18) β Kateβs journey into neuroscience
(1:48:10) β Existential risks
(1:58:55) β Meaning of life
(2:04:18) β Extraterrestrial life
(2:07:45) β Advice for young scientists
-
Thomas Gorochowski is a synthetic biologist and Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol. His lab applies tools from synthetic biology for the rational engineering of biological systems, to both provide insights into how biology controls the complex processes sustaining life, and to tackle problems spanning the sustainable production of materials to novel therapeutics.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:41) β Bioprogramming and genetic circuits
(10:52) β Simplicity vs complexity in genetic circuit design
(13:59) β Applications of control theory
(19:15) β Evolution and genetic circuits
(23:29) β Breaking down the complexity of evolution
(30:00) β Paradigm shifts in bioprogramming
(31:30) β Improving robustness by controlling evolution
(36:50) β Crosstalk between computer science and biology
(40:00) β Thomas' career path
(47:00) β Advice for aspiring synthetic biologists
-
Vandana Ravindran is a computational biologist at the Oslo Center for Biostatistics and Epidemiology. Her research involves applying mathematical modelling, specifically complex network analysis, to understand viral interactions in relation to cancer.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:29) β Basis of complex network analysis to understand biology
(06:02) β Understanding viral infection
(09:37) β Machine learning methods vs experimental data
(23:05) β Modelling cancer signalling pathways
(33:15) β Bridging the gap between computational and experimental work
(37:12) β How to get into the field
(39:15) β Advice for young scientists
- Vis mere
