Mind over Matter

Dr. Daniel Manson is a neuroscientist-turned-developer based in London.

At the moment, he is a software engineer at the London-based  LandInsight - a company providing services for land developers in England and Wales.

But back in the day, he was a Neuroscience PhD student at the University College London. There he worked in the lab of the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner John O’Keeffe under the supervision of Dr. Caswell Barry. 

Daniel started developing software while still in the academic quarters. During his PhD he managed not only to perform  his own experiments, but also to contribute to the community with his excellent  waveform GUI for hippocampal and entorhinal electrophysiology data.

In this episode, we discuss

--> why Daniel decided to leave academia

--> how his days at on the job differ from the daily grind of the PhD

--> why working for a start-up is sometimes like playing a strategy game

and more!

Prof. Redish is at the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. His lab is interested in the mechanisms underlying decision-making and spatial navigation.

In this episode, Prof. Redish discusses his metamorphosis from a theoretical computer scientist into a full-fledged experimental neuroscientist. He explains why we should all read Homer, regardless of our thesis topic, and gives insight into the thinking process behind his innovative task designs.

Viktoria is a scientific coordinator at the International Max Planck Research School for Life Sciences, affiliated with the MPI of Biochemistry. Although, frankly, saying this does not even begin to do justice to the great many projects Viktoria manages. The 15x4 series and Soapbox Science Munich are just two of them.

Prof. Kathryn Jeffery is at the University College London and the Institute of Behavioral Neuroscience.

Alongside her intensely exciting work on the encoding of complex, three dimensional space in the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit, she manages to perform an astonishing amount of outreach activities, speaking to audiences at schools, museums and professional societies, as well as collaborate with artists and make glass pieces herself!

Dr. Leopoldo Petreanu is a Principal Investigator at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown where he leads a Cortical Circuits Lab.

Dr. Petreanu is interested in the principles of inter- and intra-cortical connectivity.

He levels an appropriately multi-pronged attack on this fundamental problem. For example, to better understand cortical feedback, he studied visual cortex and the functional organization therein. While when looking at the long-range circuits, he chose to look at the sensory and motor cortices. Aside from effortlessly switching between preparations and nailing complex techniques, his lab also develops novel behavioral tasks.

In this episode, we discuss

--> what Dr. Petreanu learnt from Karel Svoboda

--> why not having quantitative skills early on is not a handicap

--> which argument for the unity of cortical computation he finds the most compelling

Prof. Dora Angelaki investigates the influence of vestibular signals on spatial cognition in the mammalian brain. We discuss why she changes fields every 10 years, her work in computational psychiatry, systems neuroscience. We also touch on what she learned as an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroscience and a member of the International Brain Laboratory. And much more!

Prof. Matthew Nolan leads a systems neuroscience laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the molecular and circuit mechanisms underlying memory and navigation in the hippocampal – entorhinal system.

Prof. Nolan is a rare example of a scientist whose work appeals both to pure theoreticians and hard line experimentalists.

In this episode, we discuss

–> open science and the value of reviewer anonymity

–> the concept of “cell type” and its (mis)use in the navigation field

–> how to supervise long-term projects and guide them to completion

Prof. op de Beeck is a Group leader of Human Brain Imaging and Rodent Visual Cognition at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

We discuss the skewed proportion of PhDs to Postdocs and the progressively narrowing funnel leading to tenure.

We also touch upon how to balance high throughput analyses of ‘natural’ behaviors with training animals to perform more sophisticated - and, admittedly, artificial - tasks.

Dr. Julija Krupic has started investigating spatial navigation in the lab of the Nobel Prize Winner John O’Keefe at the University College London and now continues to pursue this interest in her own lab at the University of Cambridge.

In this episode, Dr. Krupic reveals how she managed to become an imaginative experimentalist while having her feet firmly planted in theory, who she will be hiring for her new lab and why she is venturing into Alzheimer’s research.

Prof. Kenneth Harriss is at the Institute of Neurology at the University College London. Prof. Harriss is yet another exile from the rigorous field of Mathematics, who found a refuge under the cushy wing of the fuzziness of the Neurosciences.

His lab is leading the way in understanding how the animal’s state influences the ongoing sensory coding in different modalities.