Four professors speak on power of ideas at Scientia

By Wesley Chou     9/16/13 7:00pm

During Scientia's Sept. 10 "The Power of Ideas, Part II" colloquium, four Rice professors, Caleb Kemere, Rachel Kimbro, Daniel Wagner and Neyran Turan, each gave five-minute talks about their research to a full house at McMurtry Auditorium in Duncan Hall.

Kemere, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, said forming daily memories requires an incredibly complex neural system.

"Memory is something really amazing," Kemere said. "When we're awake, we constantly experience the world in exquisite sensory detail. That's a lot of data, maybe hundreds of megabytes per second, and if we're alive for 70 years, that's [more than] a billion seconds."

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Kemere said his lab used implanted electrodes to selectively silence memory formation in rats, causing them to forget how to navigate mazes. He said his research could eventually lead to improved therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kimbro, an associate professor of sociology, said the American health care system's flaws could be likened to people falling into a river.

"So imagine you're sitting by a stream," Kimbro said. "You suddenly hear and then see someone struggling in the water. So you jump in and rescue them. And just as you get to shore, you hear a second person struggling, so you turn back and rescue them too. As you're pulling them up, you hear a third person struggling. At this point you're thinking, why are all these people in the water, and why is nobody preventing them from falling in?"

Kimbro, who is also the director of the Urban Health Program at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said this stream metaphor applies to the U.S. health care system in that social determinants have resulted in poorer care for the disadvantaged. Kimbro said comprehensive improvements to education, communities and preventive measures are needed to move health care beyond treating advanced conditions.

Wagner, an associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology, said a major difficulty in developmental biology has been forming an embryo-development model that reflects the process's constant change.

"Throughout [developmental biology's] history, until very recently, it had a major problem in that we never knew what was going on," Wagner said. "Careful observation of an embryo at successive time points reveals dramatic changes that transform a single cell to an adult."

To illustrate zebrafish development, eight members of Wagner's lab performed a dance which used a pool noodle to represent a neural tube and colored plates as cell layers. The unorthodox presentation drew laughter as Wagner described each stage in development.

Turan, an assistant professor of architecture, said that besides architecture's purely physical aspects, she was interested in what she calls superform, the relationship between scale and form in urbanism.

"Yes, we as architects design buildings, but as part of our training, we must have the capacity to understand the world," Turan said. "At one moment, we design details and materials, and at another, we can be tricked by how a city building meets the ground."

Turan said her study of superform deals with this holistic design by considering entire city landscapes. She said that while these projects are huge, changes in scale interest her more than magnitude itself. 

Scientia Director Susan McIntosh said Scientia was founded by faculty in 1981 to host public lectures and has held such events as a workshop on the emergency response to Hurricane Ike and a symposium on the Australopithecus afarensis "Lucy."

McMurtry College senior Farid Abu-Shamat said he thought the presentations were a good outlet for professors to informally present ideas.

"The format of the short lectures provided a challenge for the experts to condense and simplify their research to promote a basic understanding among the eager audience," Abu-Shamat said. "Though the depth of the information provided by the lecturers was limited, you could sense their enthusiasm arising from the potential effects of their work."

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