What’s a Brain For? A Moving Story

A conversation with Zuckerman Institute Principal Investigator Daniel Wolpert, PhD, who discusses what makes control so hard, especially in the face of incomplete or rapidly changing information about the world.

Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert, PhD, is fascinated by how the brain controls our every movement. The ease with which humans move our arms, our eyes, even our lips when we speak masks the true complexity of the control. While computers can now beat grandmasters at chess, no computer can yet control a robot to manipulate a chess piece with the dexterity of a six-year-old child.

Daniel Wolpert read medicine at Cambridge before completing an Oxford Physiology DPhil and a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He joined the faculty at the Institute of Neurology, UCL in 1995 and moved to Cambridge University in 2005 where he was Professor of Engineering and a Royal Society Research Professor. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and made a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator. In 2018 he joined Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute Professor of Neuroscience. His research interests are computational and experimental approaches to human movement.

This conversation will be moderated by Shreya Saxena, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. Dr. Saxena is broadly interested in the neural control of coordinated, complex movements. She completed her PhD at MIT studying the closed-loop control of fast movements from a control theory standpoint. In her work at the Zuckerman Institute, she looking at how global cortical activity leads to a variety of task-related as well as spontaneous movements, and exploring how population activity in the motor cortex flexibly controls movements at a continuum of speeds.

Please register by November 6, 2019. Registration is required; seating is first come, first served.

Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University

This lecture will be livestreamed via YouTube beginning at 6:30 pm ET on November 13.











When: Wed., Nov. 13, 2019 at 6:30 pm
Where: Columbia University
116th St. & Broadway
212-854-1754
Price: Free
Buy tickets/get more info now
See other events in these categories:

A conversation with Zuckerman Institute Principal Investigator Daniel Wolpert, PhD, who discusses what makes control so hard, especially in the face of incomplete or rapidly changing information about the world.

Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert, PhD, is fascinated by how the brain controls our every movement. The ease with which humans move our arms, our eyes, even our lips when we speak masks the true complexity of the control. While computers can now beat grandmasters at chess, no computer can yet control a robot to manipulate a chess piece with the dexterity of a six-year-old child.

Daniel Wolpert read medicine at Cambridge before completing an Oxford Physiology DPhil and a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He joined the faculty at the Institute of Neurology, UCL in 1995 and moved to Cambridge University in 2005 where he was Professor of Engineering and a Royal Society Research Professor. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and made a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator. In 2018 he joined Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute Professor of Neuroscience. His research interests are computational and experimental approaches to human movement.

This conversation will be moderated by Shreya Saxena, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. Dr. Saxena is broadly interested in the neural control of coordinated, complex movements. She completed her PhD at MIT studying the closed-loop control of fast movements from a control theory standpoint. In her work at the Zuckerman Institute, she looking at how global cortical activity leads to a variety of task-related as well as spontaneous movements, and exploring how population activity in the motor cortex flexibly controls movements at a continuum of speeds.

Please register by November 6, 2019. Registration is required; seating is first come, first served.

Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University

This lecture will be livestreamed via YouTube beginning at 6:30 pm ET on November 13.

Buy tickets/get more info now