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Bright Horizons 15 Speakers

E. Mediterranean • October 25–November 5, 2012

 

YOHAY CARMEL, PH.D.

Dr. Yohay Carmel is an associate professor at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Technion — Israel Institute of Technology. Between 2006 and 2010 he was the chairman of The Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental Science, where he led a new direction emphasizing science—policy relations.

Prof. Carmel joined the Technion in 2000, and established the Ecology and Environment GIS Laboratory, which currently hosts three senior research fellows and eight graduate students. His major research subjects include applications of remote sensing and GIS methods in ecology and environmental science, spatial patterns of biodiversity, theoretical and methodological principles of ecological modelling, and the propagation and risk of forest fires.

In particular, Prof. Carmel is interested in tools to facilitate the prioritization of land for conservation. Many of his research projects are conducted jointly with the Nature and Parks Authority, the Forest Authority (JNF), and the Ministry of Environment in Isreal. In 2006–2007 he was involved in a LEEMP-GEF conservation project in Nigeria titled Monitoring Protected Areas in Nigeria.

Prof. Carmel earned his bachelor degree in biology from Haifa University at Oranim, and his master and doctoral degrees in Environmental Biology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is married with three daughters and lives in a rural community near Nazareth.

DAVID LUNNEY, PH.D.

David Lunney received his Ph.D. from McGill University, in 1992. When not slinging atoms in the McGill cyclotron, he was trying to lure them into an ion trap to measure their mass. He settled at the Universite de Paris Sud, where he now leads the nuclear physics department at the Center for Mass Spectrometry. Working at CERN’s radioactive beam facility, he continues weighing atoms to gain insight into stellar nucleosynthesis and the laws governing quarks in nuclei. Dr. Lunney has held fellowships at CERN and at Canada’s National Laboratory, TRIUMF. He is Director of Research with France’s Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.

STEPHEN MACKNIK, PH.D.

Stephen Macknik received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the laboratory of Prof. Margaret Livingstone. He was then a postdoctoral fellow with the Nobel Laureate Prof. David Hubel at Harvard Medical School, and also with Prof. Zach Mainen at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Dr. Macknik led his first laboratory at University College London, and is currently a Laboratory Director at the Barrow Neurological Institute.

Dr. Macknik’s research and scientific outreach activities have been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, NPR, and Der Spiegel, among hundreds of media stories. He is board member of Scientific American, where he has published several feature articles and for which he published a free monthly online column on the neuroscience of illusions. His other publication credits include contributions to Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

SUSANA MARTINEZ-CONDE, PH.D.

Susana Martinez-Conde is director of the Martinez-Conde Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute.

Susana is interested in the aspects of the neural code that relate to our visual perception. One of the ways she addresses this is by correlating the eye movements that occur during visual fixation with the spike trains that they provoke in single neurons. Since visual images fade when eye movements are absent, it makes sense that the patterns of neural firing that correlate best with fixational eye movements are important to conveying the visibility of a stimulus. She has found that bursts of spikes are better related to fixational eye movements than singles spikes alone. This suggests that bursts of spikes are more reliable signals than are single spikes.

Susana coedited Visual Perception Part 1, Volume 154: Fundamentals of Vision: Low and Mid-Level Processes in Perception (Progress in Brain Research) and Visual Perception Part 2, Volume 155: Fundamentals of Awareness, Multi-Sensory Integration and High-Order Perception (Progress in Brain Research) (Progress in Brain Research), coauthored Mind tricks — Cognitive Scientists Take a Lesson from Magicians, Windows on the Mind, Microsaccades Counteract Visual Fading During Fixation, and Novel Visual Illusions Related to Vasarely”s “Nested Squares” Show That Corner Salience Varies With Corner Angle, and authored Fixational Eye Movements in Normal And Pathological Vision. Read her full list of publications!

She completed her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain in 1996, followed by postdoctoral studies in the Harvard Medical School laboratory of Nobel Laureate David Hubel (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1981). Her research focuses on the neurobiology of visual awareness, perception, illusions, and art and her work has been published in top academic journals as well as in popular science magazines, such as Scientific American. Susana has given lectures to several arts organizations and museums. She has also been recently featured for her lab’s research and contributions in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Discover Magazine, and Nature.

Susana is a Founding Member and Executive Chair of the Neural Correlate Society, which hosts the Annual Best Visual Illusion of the Year contest. “The contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community. Visual illusions are those perceptual experiences that do not match physical reality.” She was elected to the Board of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in 2005 and cochaired the 11th Annual Meeting of the ASSC in June 2007.

JEANETTE NORDEN, PH.D.

Dr. Jeanette Norden is a Neuroscientist and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. For over 20 years, she conducted research on nerve regeneration, focusing on GAP-43, a protein involved in nervous system development, regeneration, and plasticity. Since 1998, she has devoted her time to medical, graduate, and undergraduate education. She is currently the Director of Medical Education in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. She has been a maverick in Medical Education, stressing not only intellectual, but also personal and interpersonal development in students. Her emphasis on personal development and her innovative approach in integrating “humanity’ into a basic science course has been recognized at Vanderbilt, nationally and internationally. She has won every award given by medical students, including the Shovel (twice; given by the graduating class to the faculty member who has had the most positive influence on them in their four years of medicine), the Jack Davies Award (eight times; for Teaching Excellence in the Basic Sciences), and the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award (four times). She was awarded the first Chair of Teaching Excellence at Vanderbilt University, and was the first recipient of both the Gender Equity Award of the American Medical Women’s Association, and the Teaching Excellence Award given by the Vanderbilt Medical School. Dr. Norden’s teaching has been recognized nationally and internationally as well. In 2000, she was the recipient of the Robert J. Glaser Award, a national teaching award from the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society of the American Medical Association. In recognition of her devotion to helping medical students develop into caring, compassionate physicians, Dr. Norden was awarded the 2008 Professional Award from The Compassionate Friends, an international group for bereaved parents. Most recently (2010), she was awarded the John Chapman Award, a national award for Transformative Innovations in Medical Education.

Dr. Norden participates in numerous outreach programs in Nashville and the surrounding communities by going to schools or by giving public talks on psychoactive drugs, the aging brain, and other topics related to the Neurosciences. For a number of years, she has taught extremely popular courses in Neuroscience as part of Retirement Learning at Vanderbilt. She has traveled extensively to foreign countries to give scientific presentations, talks and workshops on teaching, or to teach Medical School (Nepal); in 2004, she was a delegate to AIDS clinics in rural South Africa as part of a cross cultural humanitarian and educational program in palliative care. Dr. Norden served as the external reviewer for a Keck Foundation grant to revise undergraduate science education in 16 colleges in the South. She was highlighted as one of the most effective teachers in America in What the Best College Teachers Do (K. Bain, Harvard University Press, 2004), and was the focus of a documentary made by the Korean Public Broadcasting network on Teaching Excellence in America; she was one of six teachers profiled in The Art of Teaching: Best Practices from Master Educators. Dr. Norden has been invited to give over 100 presentations on teaching at Universities and Medical Schools. In 2007, she completed a 36 lecture DVD Understanding the Brain as part of the Great Courses series for The Teaching Company in an effort to help inform the public about the brain and common neurological disorders. In 2010, she taught neurosciences on a Scientific American cruise in the Mediterranean. In recognition of her impact on helping to educate the public about the brain and neurological disorders, in 2011 the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and Center for Neuroscience at Vanderbilt established an annual Jeanette J. Norden Outreach Lectureship in her honor.

CHRIS STRINGER, PH.D.

Chris Stringer has worked at The Natural History Museum London since 1973, and is now Research Leader in Human Origins and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His early research was on the relationship of Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe, but through his work on the ‘Out of Africa’ theory of modern human origins, he now collaborates with archaeologists, dating specialists, and geneticists in attempting to reconstruct the evolution of modern humans globally. He has excavated at sites in Britain and abroad, and is currently leading the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project in its third phase (AHOB3), funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He has published over 200 scientific papers, and his recent books include The Complete World of Human Evolution (revised edition 2011, with Peter Andrews), the award-winning Homo Britannicus (2006), and his latest book The Origin of Our Species (UK 2011), alternative title (US, March 2012) Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth.

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