This seminar will begin at 4:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus (L8-084).

Daniel Wolpert is a Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia's Vagelos College of Physicans and Surgeons and a Principal Investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute.

As a computational neuroscientist, Daniel Wolpert is fascinated by how the brain controls our every movement. The effortless ease with which humans move our arms, our eyes, even our lips when we speak masks the true complexity of the control processes involved. This is evident when we try to build machines to perform human control tasks. 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. Dr. Wolpert's research examines a major factor that makes control hard, the uncertainty about our body and the world as reflected in sensory and motor signals, and the mechanisms used by the brain to control movement in the face of this uncertainty.

Dr. 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.

This seminar will be moderated by Kelley Remole, PhD, Senior Director of Scientific Programs at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute.

Growing Up in Science is a seminar series initiated at NYU by Drs. Wei Ji Ma and Cristina Alberini in 2014. The speakers of this series do not talk about their science; they talk about the human side of becoming and being a scientist. They share their successes as well as the struggles, weaknesses, detours and failures.

This seminar is a joint effort of the Zuckerman Institute and the Columbia University Postdoctoral Society and is part of the Growing Up in Science seminar series. For questions about this or future seminars, please contact series organizers Bianca Jones Marlin, PhD, Chiara Bertipaglia, PhD or Dr. Rainer Engelken.