Presidential Lectures

Most sensory stimuli in the natural world exhibit strong statistical regularities. A proposed general principle of sensory neuroscience is that the brain’s circuitry is designed to take advantage of these statistical regularities.

While significant progress has been made on key cosmological questions, many remain unanswered: What happened during the first moments of the big bang? What is dark energy? What were the properties of the first stars?

This talk describes experimental progress toward controlling quantum mechanical coherence and entanglement in a solid-state environment.

This talk is based on mathematical and computational studies of neural network models. Understanding the range of dynamic phenomena in such models provides a basis for thinking about the more complex dynamics of real neural circuits.

The evolution of organisms requires the generation of some diversity in the offspring and then the selection of the fittest in the present environment from among this diversity in the population. The rates of evolution can be influenced by mutation rates that are in turn influenced by a wide variety of stresses that can occur as sperm or eggs are produced or even as the organism develops.

This talk discusses progress in developing devices that can restore lost functions of the nervous system following disease or injury, in particular the development of a brain computer interface (BCI) that is designed to restore independence and control for people with paralysis.