(with tenure, semi-retired) Laboratory for NeuroEngineering Coulter Dept. of Biomedical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University School of Medicine
My Maker Sabbatical has morphed into a Maker Lifestyle!
I am continuing to participate in the MAKER MOVEMENT, and am teaching maker workshops in Ireland. I am now an Adjunct Associate Professor at Georgia Tech and have closed my research lab. To all my alumni, collaborators and colleagues world-wide: I thank you all for your work and support in making my lab so successful!
My life outside of the ivory tower involves making and selling lovely and useful things with woodworking and electronics, programming of gadgets, paid consulting, mentoring, public speaking, and book writing. I wrote a book about REAL-WORLD TEACHING approaches that have been tremendously successful in my classes. It is called “How to Motivate Your Students to Love Learning“. It is now available at Amazon and other booksellers: Go to my book’s Amazon page. This poster provides a visual summary of the key points of the book:
If you were hoping to join my lab, sorry, it no longer exists. I am sure you can find another lab in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering to join. There are many exciting things going on with my former colleagues there!
To see Google Scholar’s most current list of my papers, including how many times they have been cited, click here. For a complete list of papers and abstracts, see our Publications page or Academia.edu, which has a nice interface for browsing abstracts.
At Caltech, I worked jointly in the labs of Scott Fraser and Jerry Pine. Jerry was a professor of Biophysics in the Physics department. Scott (now at USC) was the head of the Caltech Biological Imaging Center. In 1994, we put together one of the first 2-Photon laser-scanning microscopes. This type of optical microscope allows viewing of living specimens for longer periods with less photobleaching and less phototoxicity than with other fluorescence microscopes.
Development of the mammalian olfactory system, a 2-photon imaging collaboration with Peter Mombaerts, then a professor at the Rockefeller University (now head of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany).
Other Interests
I am interested in many fields related to brains and thinking, such as:
Review of Norman Doidge’s book, “The brain that changes itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science.”
Networking on the Volkscomputer: the Wave of the Future. Apple Computer had an essay contest when I was a grad student at UC Irvine. It was 1992 and I think my ideas were a bit too far ahead of their time for Apple to appreciate. I basically described what became AppleTV and Siri — yet I didn’t win the prize: a MacSE 🙁
When Technology Becomes Us. Review of Andy Clark’s “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence”
The Meaning of “Life”. A paper I wrote in college, to get at what we mean when we talk about living vs. non-living things.
DNA Is Not a Blueprint! Essay about how information is layered in biological systems, and often drawn from the environment.
Just Pretending. Essay about the role of pretending in children’s play and in learning.
For two years while at Caltech, I led a reading group on books about the mind, at Pasadena’s premier independent bookstore, Vroman’s (https://vromansbookstore.com/).
Books we read and discussed:
A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, by Merlin Donald
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, by Ray Kurzweil
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Antonio Damasio
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, by Douglas Hofstadter
Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness, by Daniel C. Dennett
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and the World Together Again, by Andy Clark
Evolving Brains, by John Allman
The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, by Michael Tomasello
The Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky
A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi
Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
I have dabbled in a variety of activities, including bicycling, hang gliding, racquetball, hiking, reading, thinking about thinking, woodworking, collecting rocks and other heavy objects, remote-control sailplane flying, photography, fixing and building things, creating unusual art, and body-surfing.
