Scientific Sense ®

Why Libet’s studies don’t pose a threat to free will,  Agency and intervention, Neurotechnologies for Mind Reading, and Neuroethics Prof. Adina Roskies who is Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Cognitive Science Program, and an affiliate of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Dr. Roskies’ research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, and include philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics. She has coauthored a book with Stephen Morse, A Primer on Criminal Law and Neuroscience.

Standard model and supersymmetry of particle physics, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and novel uses of machine learning in experimental Physics. Prof. Manfred Paulini is a Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the CMS experiment operating at the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) at CERN. He is looking for the production of dark matter particle in collision events at the LHC. In recent years he has started to explore novel machine learning and AI based approaches for event classification in particle physics, where he is interested to use ML to go beyond the classic data analysis approaches that have been used in particle physics for many years.

Intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and learning: animals, humans and education systems, neuroscience basis of curiosity and learning, reward uncertainty and information transmission in the brain. Prof. Jacqueline Gottlieb is Professor of Neuroscience and the founder and director of the Research Cluster on Curiosity at Columbia University. Dr. Gottlieb studies the neural mechanisms of attention and their relationship with information processing, including learning, decision making, and curiosity.

Direct Measurement of the Cosmic Acceleration, The Hubble expansion is isotropic in the epoch of dark energy, How to Detect Inclined Water Maser Disks and Measure Black Hole Masses, Extragalactic Proper Motions: Gravitational Waves and Cosmology, and New Limits on Axionic Dark Matter from the Magnetar. Prof. Jeremy Darling is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He studies black holes, galaxy evolution, and cosmology. Mostly using telescopes, but sometimes just by thinking.

Predator community composition is linked to soil carbon retention across a human land use gradient, and Animals and the zoogeochemistry of the carbon cycle Prof. Oswald Schmitz, Professor of Population and Community Ecology in the Yale University School of Environment. His research aims to make sense of nature’s complexity that comes from interdependencies among the variety of carnivore, herbivore, and plant species that coexist within ecosystems. These insights help to inform environmental stewardship to enhance the conservation of wildlife species and ensure the sustainability of ecosystems, their functions, and the services that they provide to humankind. He teaches courses on the role of humans in nature and how humans can develop the means to coexist harmoniously with nature. His book “The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene” encapsulates much of his thinking about humans and nature, making ecological science accessible to a broader readership.

Artemis - A whole new program to travel to the moon and to establish a habitat there including an observatory, gateway that orbits with self propulsion and designing a launch pad for future exploration of the solar system including Mars. Prof. Jack Burns is a Professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is also Vice President Emeritus for Academic Affairs and Research for the CU System. Prof. Burns has 345 publications in refereed journals, books, and in conference proceedings and abstracts (as listed in NASA’s Astrophysics Data System). His research has been featured in articles and on the covers of Scientific American, Nature, and Science. His teaching and research focus on extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, supercomputer numerical simulations, astrophysics from the Moon, and public policy issues in higher education and science. Burns is director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR), a $6.5 million center recently awarded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute. Burns is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Linking Social and Personal Preferences, and Asset Markets with Asymmetric Reasoning. Prof. William Zame is Professor of Economics and Mathematics at UCLA. His recent research includes work on the impact of culture on economic outcomes in diverse societies, informational asymmetries in macroeconomics, experimental financial markets, and a number of topics in machine learning. He is currently Co-Editor of Economic Theory and Associate Editor of Theoretical Economics.

The cosmological legacy of Planck, design, data, results and insights, Calibration of ALMA Using Planck Observations, and Can CMB Surveys Help the AGN Community? Prof. Bruce Partridge is an emeritus professor of Astronomy at Haverford college. He has served as Education Officer of the American Astronomical Society; president of Commission on Cosmology, International Astronomical Union; and President, Astronomical Society of the Pacific. His research interests include cosmology, galaxy formation, the cosmic microwave background and radio astronomy.

Vitamin A: its many roles—from vision and synaptic plasticity to infant mortality Prof. John Dowling is Research Professor of Neurosciences at Harvard. His interests include the wiring, physiology, pharmacology and genetics of the retina, as well as the effects of vitamin A and photoreceptors on vision.

Extended halo of metal-poor stars in Andromeda, Dwarf galaxies, Star migration, Surface brightness fluctuations and understanding dark matter by studying satellite galaxies. Prof. Raja GuhaThakurta is a Professor and Department Chair of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research focuses on galaxies: their dark matter content, cannibalism history, and chemical enrichment as revealed by spectroscopy of their resolved stellar populations. He uses the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck telescope for his research.