In this episode of the Brains and Machines podcast, EE Times regular Sunny Bains talks to Dr Mitra Hartmann, Professor of both Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, and head of their sensory and neural engineering group. They discuss the ways in which modelling animal perceptual systems—in her case, the rat—can make us better at both understanding the brain and building technology. After that, Sunny discusses the interview with Giulia D’Angelo from the Italian Institute of Technology and Ralph Etienne-Cummings from Johns Hopkins University.