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 at the University of Chicago. I had a great time! I was hosted there by Brent Doiron, the director of the center, and I was able to see 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 also 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 experienced back in my postdoc years in the US. Our research environment in the labs in Spain is often too constrained in many ways (funding, time, collaborations, …) what prevents PIs and students from taking more risks. In any case, the experience was great. I hope we will be able to start a collaboration with Brent’s team and perhaps other researchers in the Institute sometime in the future.
Jaime
