On Friday, February 24, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Palmer, Professor at UChicago in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and the Department of Physics.
Stephanie Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago. She has a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and works on questions at the interface of neuroscience and statistical physics. Her recent work explores the question of how the visual system processes incoming information to make fast and accurate predictions about the future positions of moving objects in the environment. She was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and holds a CAREER award from the NSF. Starting during her undergraduate years at Michigan State University, Stephanie has been teaching chemistry, physics, math, and biology to a wide range of students. At the University of Chicago, she founded and runs the Brains! Program, which brings local middle school kids from the South Side of Chicago to her lab to learn hands-on neuroscience.
How did Dr. Palmer get here?
Dr. Palmer was an avid reader when young, learning about all things related to science. She would “cycle through learning about different people, and their jobs, and their discoveries,” although she wasn’t sure how this would translate into a career.
When entering her undergraduate studies, Dr. Palmer was initially planning to take pre-med classes, although she found that these weren’t the classes that she enjoyed the most. Rather, although she loved her premed classes such as organic chemistry, Dr. Palmer found herself becoming quite excited about physics; this actually happened “through a chemistry project [Dr. Palmer] was working on.”
How did Dr. Palmer choose to become a scientist?
Unlike some of her classmates, Dr. Palmer did not experiment with many careers beyond science. She had an idea of what it meant to be a teacher, since she would sometimes tag along with her mother, a high school English teacher, when she was younger, but Dr. Palmer did not do any internships such as law or medicine in college. She recalls some of the factors to consider when choosing a career: “figure out that special intersection of what you like to do, and what you’re good at, and what people will pay you to do.”
Dr. Palmer finds neuroscience especially interesting and perhaps more accessible to things such as citizen science projects. She states that, given the fact that we all have a brain, “there’s some fundamental way in which we’re all interested in how it works.”
How can we help encourage students to learn about science?
Dr. Palmer believes that “it’s important to be able to see yourself” in a field; even a few examples are better than none. She recalls how, as a younger student, Marie Curie was her own example of a successful woman in science. In her own research group, Dr. Palmer works to encourage diversity of both thought and background, because she believes that different experiences and ways of approaching problems can help lead to an even better result.
How does a research group work?
A typical graduate student in Dr. Palmer’s research group would likely take a couple of classes at UChicago, then would have a choice as to how to spend the rest of their time. In Dr. Palmer’s group, this unstructured time might look like a combination of “analyzing data from [their] collaborators,” building computer simulations, working on writing papers, or doing something else completely different, like learning a new STEM skill or exploring a completely different subject perhaps in the arts, but just as important.
Additionally, students meet with Dr. Palmer, their mentor, on a regular basis; she makes sure her students know that they are “working with [her], not for [her].” Because of this, students are able to take ownership of their work and research.
Students in Dr. Palmer’s research group spend much of their time collaborating with one another, rather than just struggling alone. They are able to ask each other questions if they feel stuck, taking advantage of the wide range of skills within the group.
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