Undergraduate Lecture Series 2018

Undergraduate Lecture Series 2018

Dr. Leyla Isik - MIT - "The Neural Basis of Perceiving Human Visual Social Perception (49:49)"
CBMM Research Thrusts 2 & 4 Postdoctoral Associate - Circuits for Intelligence, Social intelligence

Andrei Barbu (Boris Katz Lab) - MIT

Andrei Barbu is a research scientist at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, working on lanugage, vision, and robotics, with a touch of neuroscience.

Professor Emery Brown - MIT - "The Dynamics of the Unconscious Brain Under General Anesthesia (45:59)"

Emery N. Brown is the Edward Hood Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Brown received his B.A. (magna cum laude) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College, his M.A. and his Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University and his M.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose experimental research has made important contributions towards understanding the neuroscience of how anesthetics act in the brain to create the states of general anesthesia. In his statistics research he has developed signal processing algorithms to solve important data analysis challenges in neuroscience. His research has been featured on National Public Radio, in Scientific American, Technology Review, the New York Times and in TEDMED 2014.

Professor Mike Halassa - MIT - "The thalamus in cognitive control and flexibility"

Michael Halassa is a neuroscientist who aims to understand the basic circuit mechanisms of how information is routed in the brain and how disruptions in these circuits can lead to neurological and psychiatric disorders. As a practicing psychiatrist he aims to develop novel approaches to diagnosing and treating these illnesses guided by insights both from the lab and clinic.

Professor Nancy Kanwisher - MIT - "Functional Imaging of the Human Brain: A Window into the Organization of the Human Mind"
CBMM Research Thrust 4 Leader – Social Intelligence, and Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Dr. Wiktor Młynarski (McDermott Lab)

Wiktor Młynarski was a postdoctoral researcher working in the Computational Audition Lab at Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT. He was also a member of the Center for Brains Minds and Machines.

Professor Gabriel Kreiman - Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School - "Everything you always wanted to know about the visual system but were afraid to ask"

Gabriel Kreiman is Associate Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. He is also a faculty at Children’s Hospital, the Department of Neurology at HMS, the Center for Brain Science, the Swartz Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and the Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative at Harvard. He studied Physical Chemistry for his B.Sc. at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (1996). He received a M.Sc. and Ph.D. (Biology and Computational Neuroscience) from the California Institute of Technology in 2002 under Prof. Koch’s mentorship. He pursued postdoctoral work with Prof. Poggio at MIT. The Kreiman Laboratory combines computational modeling, neurophysiological recordings and psychophysical measurements to further our understanding of the neuronal circuits and mechanisms underlying perception and cognition.

Professor Roger Levy - MIT - "Foundational architecture of human language comprehension, production, and acquisition (1:13:01)"

Roger Levy, Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, describes his research on human language understanding, which integrates linguistic theory, computational models, psychological experimentation using measurements such as eye tracking while reading, and the use of language datasets such as Google Books. Humans use language to communicate with extraordinary flexibility in spite of challenges such as ambiguity, the presence of environmental noise, memory limitations, and incomplete knowledge of their interlocutors. Dr. Levy illustrates some examples of complex language understanding and leads a Q&A session with students.