This seminar will begin at 4:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus (L7-119).

Official Story

Wei Ji received his PhD in physics from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He went on to do postdocs in computational neuroscience with Dr. Christof Koch at Caltech and Dr. Alex Pouget at the University of Rochester. He was assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine from 2008 to 2013, and has since been associate professor of neural science and psychology at New York University (NYU). His research focuses on perceptual and cognitive decision-making under uncertainty.

Unofficial Story

Wei Ji is a third-generation Dutch whose single mom vacillated between Chinese tiger parenting and Dutch irreverence. Weiji had a bizarre childhood, graduating from high school at age 14 and from college at 17, along the way picking up media appearances, deficits in social skills, and an inflated self-image. His confidence came crashing down in his PhD, which was initially misguided (bad advisor) and eventually just too hard (string theory). He was leaning heavily on a fellow grad student and his PhD never felt like his own. Weiji was also easily distracted, spending more time being active in organizations and playing online chess than doing research. Making it to faculty seemed like a distant dream. He considered alternative careers, including business consulting, but decided to give science one more chance. Starting as a postdoc offered new opportunities for delusions of grandeur: he thought he would solve consciousness using statistical physics. Back on Earth, Weiji published only one book chapter with Christof Koch, and in 2004, Christof had no choice but to kick him out of his lab. Only in his second postdoc, under Alex Pouget's whip, did he start to get his act together, but this was also a time when, working besides a talented fellow postdoc, impostor complex hit hard. Weiji got his faculty job thanks to just enough people seeing promise in the absence of accomplishments. His procrastination is still alive and kicking to this day, but since his students and postdocs now do the actual work, he can get away with it.

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.

This seminar 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, or Chiara Bertipaglia, PhD.