In this special episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, Dr. Sunny Bains and Dr. Giulia D’Angelo talk to four early career researchers: Dr. Kenneth Stewart, a computer scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC; Dr. Laura Kriener, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Bern in Switzerland; Jens Pedersen, a Ph.D. student at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden; and Dr. Fabrizio Ottati, an AI/ML computer architect at NXP Semiconductors in Hamburg, Germany. They discuss learning rules for spiking neural networks, primitives for computations on neuromorphic hardware, and the benefits and drawbacks of neuromorphic engineering.