Jaime visits Grossman Center for Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior
I’m back after five months in the Grossman Center for Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior Chicago. I had a great time! I was hosted there by Brent Doiron, the director of the center, and I was able to share some of the science his team is doing. I was impressed by the breath of the problems they are currently studying from recurrent networks dynamics, the impact of short term synaptic plasticity, learning and learning gating in circuits composed of different cell types, pattern formation in extended neural fields, information encoding in hairs cells, etc. And most of the time with strong ties between the modeling and the experimental data, as a result of multiple collaborations with other laboratories in the Institute and elsewhere. I was impressed by how students have the freedom to choose or shape their research projects, even if they have little experience to make that kind of choices. There was a great sense of freedom in terms of finding your own questions and problems something I also experience back in my postdoc years in the US. Our research environment are often too constraint in many ways (funding, time, collaborations, …) what prevents PIs and students from taking more risks. In any case, the experience was great and I hope to start collaborating with Brent and other researchers in the Institute very soon. My only complain would be… it passed too fast.
Jaime
