CMU Neural Engineering Seminar
Speaker: Dr. Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract: In this talk, I will describe a notion of network cognition that manifests in how we engage with the curious world around us. To do so, I will draw together three lines of inquiry in mind, brain, and computation. I'll begin with a line of inquiry into connective curiosity ("How do we connect bits of information as we walk about the world?"), then move into graph learning ("How do we build larger network models from those connections?"), and finally end in network control theory ("How is that model building constrained by the brain's own connective structure?"). The studies discussed will span experiment, model, and theory, and bridge human behavior, neural representations, and computational science. Together they frame a formal investigation into network cognition and motivate future inquiry.
About the Speaker: Prof. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. Bassett is most well-known for blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. Bassett received a B.S. in physics from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge, UK as a Churchill Scholar, and as an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, Bassett was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. Bassett received multiple prestigious awards, including American Psychological Association's ‘Rising Star’ (2012), Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow (2014), MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER (2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018), OHBM Young Investigator Award (2020), AIMBE College of Fellows (2020), American Physical Society Fellow (2021), and has been named one of Web of Science's most Highly Cited Researchers for 4 years running. Bassett is the author of more than 450 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered over 53,000 citations, as well as numerous book chapters and teaching materials. Bassett’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, the ISI Foundation, and the Center for Curiosity. Bassett has recently co-authored Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (MIT Press) with philosopher and twin Perry Zurn.