Dr. Ann Hermundstad - a podcast by Nancy Padilla

Throughout her career, Dr. Ann Hermundstad has found ways to merge creativity and technical expertise to excel in science. As a child, she loved art, writing, and math, but without a clear career path into the more traditionally creative disciplines of writing and art, she decided to pursue an engineering degree at the Colorado School of Mines. In her engineering classes, she learned there was more to science than memorization. In fact, creative thinking was the foundation for the logical frameworks and problem solving skills that are so essential to science. As a physics PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ann was curious about how physics could be applied to understand the brain and collaborated with colleagues in the psychology department to better understand the functional organization of the brain using neuroimaging techniques. Doctorate complete, Ann fully embraced her love for neuroscience and joined Dr. Vijay Balasubramanian at the University of Pennsylvania for her postdoctoral work. At UPenn and a collaborating lab in Paris, Ann studied how neural architecture can effectively represent the statistical properties of our sensory environment. Now, as a group leader at Janelia, Dr. Hermundstad merges her creative inclinations with her background in physics and math to study efficient coding. Specifically, she wants to understand how the networks in the brain, constrained by the limits of their biology, can best encode, predict, and flexibly respond to the external environment. Learn more about Ann’s fascinating career by reading her profile and listen to her story in her own words on the Stories of WiN podcast.

Further episodes of Stories of WiN

Further podcasts by Nancy Padilla

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