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APRIL 19, 2013

THE PIONEER LOG

FEATURES

CUTTING-EDGE DEVELOPMENTS AND DREADED QUESTIONS

A look into the hidden lives of professors

Assistant Professor of Psychology

BY JOEY CARMICHAEL
STAFF WRITER

Rebecca Copenhaver
Professor of Philosophy

The Pioneer Log sat down with a handful of professors and asked them the following questions:

Todd Watson

1. What do you consider to be the major and cuttingedge developments in your field of study? 2. Care to share any exciting work that you yourself are doing? 3. What is the question you most dread being asked about your field of study (or your professorship)?

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Peter Drake

Assistant Professor of Biology

PHOTO BY CAMAS GOBLE PHOTO BY SARAH DODGE PHOTO BY SARAH DODGE PHOTO BY SARAH DODGE

Peter Kennedy

WWW.PIOLOG.COM

READ THESE PROFESSORS ENTIRE RESPONSES ONLINE AT

For philosophy of mind, which is what I study, I think the most cuttingedge developments of the field are primarily methodological. In particular, weve made a lot of progress on particular phenomena that have puzzled us for thousands of years: perception, memory, imagination, aesthetics [and] morals. Arguably the most profitable topic in philosophy of mind today is perception. That wasnt true in the middle of the 20th century. But today, philosophers are giving very fine-grained, very explanatorily fruitful accounts of what the nature of perceptual experience is like that are informed by very successful programs in cognitive psychology -- in particular, in vision science. *** Im very interested in the distinction between whats visible, and whats seeable; whats audible and whats hearable; whats tactible and whats feelable -- and I dont think theyre the same thing. For example, strictly speaking, all thats really visible are two-dimensional shapes -- maybe sort of two-and-a-half D -- edges, color, illumination, and thats it. Given stereopsis (namely, the relationship between our eyeballs, and some facts about the optical nerve and how its hooked up to the brain), you might stretch it and say we also can see some depth. (Thats why I said two-anda-half D rather than 2D sketch.) But it seems just obvious to me that we see a whole lot more than just whats visible. *** What I dread being asked by an average, ordinary person about being a professor is: So, how much time do you have off ? You get summers off, right? And Winter Break off ? Because, of course, its not a question. What it is is a sort of, like, Oh, you have this really cushy, slacker life. And to a certain extent, it can be forgiven. It does look like we dont do much! I mean, I teach, what -- nine hours a week? Pfft. Well, obviously, Im not just working nine hours a week. But, people have a tendency of thinking that when a professor isnt actually in front of students in a classroom theyre sitting by the side of the pool, drinking a Mai Tai. I work way more than 40 hours a week, and I do it 365 days a year. Thats not to say that my job is not extremely privileged, and extremely cozy, and extremely rewarding and wonderful. But it is a lot of hard work.

Well, theres a lot going on. The things that people are most excited about right now are mobile computing (phones, iPads and things) and parallel computing. Theres an odd thing called Moores Law that says that about every eighteen months, the power of computers (or how much power you can get for a given price) approximately doublesand this has been going on for several decades. Its actually pretty weird that you could make a law predicting the rate at which innovation will happen. But, a few years ago we seem to have hit a limit, in that our processors are not getting faster anymore. Instead, were getting more processors. *** A more complex example is in playing games (especially Gomy research is on writing programs to play Go). The traditional techniques, and the techniques that conquered chess, essentially, are: consider all the moves I can make, and all the responses the opponent might make, and all the responses I can make to that, and so on. Now, even chess is far too large to actually read out to the end of the game, but we can read ahead and then say: Alright, if I make this sequence of ten moves, does the board look good for me? *** Everybody has things that you just have trouble getting into your head, or things that you havent used in a long time that you once knew and you forgot. And there are certain areas of math that I use (I do stuff with graphs, and sets, and logic and so on) and other things (you know, calculus) that I dont happen to use very much. I dread that, a few years down the road when Im Chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, somebody is going to ask me some very simple calculus question and Im not going to know the answerso, Ill have to punt on that.

Some of the things that people have gotten interested in are the contributions of genetically-transmitted, pre-existing brain differences that could predispose people to suffer from (if thats the right word) a number of different behavior patterns and psychiatric conditions. People have started to figure out that a certain subset of underlying variables might be predisposing factors to a number of related (but, at the level of the phenotype: peoples actual behaviors; the way its expressed) differences. *** The last couple of years weve been mainly looking at binge drinking in a couple of different ways, and weve done one study (last summer) looking at the way the brain processes food-related and non-food-related images. Were looking to see if theres a difference between those two (and it turns out there is), and to see if that does anything to tell us about peoples eating habits, or how much they weighthings like that. *** When will the things that youre learning in the lab actually help people? So, how do you make the bridge between basic, pure science and actually changing peoples lives. And thats a hard one. For instance, people have known for years and years that, not only do alcoholics have differences in some of the ways that their brain functions, but that their close relatives (who may have never touched a drop of alcohol in their lives) tend to show the same changesat least compared to the rest of the population. So, we can say something about groups of people, but there has been much less progress in translating these findings in a way that could help or be diagnostically predictive of individual patients. Thats one of those questions that we dont have a really great answer for, right now. I always tell students that thats their Nobel Prize, right there.

One of the big cutting-edge topics is really the ability to now know a whole lot more about what types of microorganisms are present in all kinds of environments. For a long time we were limited by the ability to study microbes because they could only be grown in culture. We knew that there were lots of bugs that were out in the environment that just could not be cultured, and so we were missing a big part of it. Theres been a huge push in the last, say, 30 years or so, to really change that. A bunch of DNA-based methods have come online that have allowed that to happen. *** One of the big questions that we have focused on in my lab is really trying to better understand the ecology, and the role of microorganisms in forest ecosystems broadly defined. For a long time, they were treated by other ecologists, who didnt study microbes, as kind of this black box: stuff would go into the soil, and stuff would come out of the soil, and they didnt really know how that worked. Luckily, like I said, with some of these DNA based techniques, we know a lot more about whos there. So, the question that were excited about tackling in my lab is not just saying whos there, but, what are they doing, how are they interacting with each other? In particular, what are the ecological factors that are driving community diversity of microorganisms, and then of course ultimatelyhopefullytheir function in those ecosystems. *** Probably the one that I get the most is actually from my own parents, and its: So, why are you studying these things? How are you going to change the world with this book? or, How are you going to make some money doing that? Its such a complex ecosystem that were trying to study, and were studying such a diverse part of it, that were taking (and hopefully making) baby steps in the right direction. But were not going to figure it out immediately. So, thats always sort of a funny oneI dont quite know how to answer my folks with that one. Its probably best to say to that, I think what were studying is important, and a lot of it is about the process: the interaction between students, and learning, and having exposure to this field is as important to me as what the final products are of the research that were doing.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ZOE HUBER

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