Hi my name is Anthony Lee, we're at UCSF right now.
I'm originally from Arlington, Texas, born and raised there.
My parents are from Taiwan.
I went to school on the east coast, at Duke.
And I'm actually taking some time off right now from med school to pursue some research.
Grad school's a good time to explore not only like a new subject, but also like yourself.
And like, you have a lot of, like, flexibility and freedom.
And it's one of the few sort of career moments where you actually have a lot of control over
your own schedule.
And so, you find yourself also trying like new things, and so.
Right now we're in the Mission Bay campus in the neuroscience building, and I'm studying
the pre-frontal cortex.
So, it's this part of the brain that controls a lot of executive functioning.
There are famous historical cases of people who are missing their pre-frontal cortex and
they're unable to control their actions.
That they become very impulsive, they become very rude, they lack inhibition, if you will.
And so I study this part of the brain that is truly responsible for controlling a lot
of your, sort of, emotions or thoughts.
So we have like, experiments in the lab where if you disrupt certain cell types, it disrupts
social interactions, or it disrupts decision making, and so these are processes that we
do in the lab that, in some cases like really similarly they may make human disease.
And it's pretty, like, incredible to think that we have these cells that are arranged
in a certain way, but the circuit diagram is completely unknown.
But somehow this diagram can compute all these different inputs that, like, get sent in to
this part of the brain.
And some how the diagram processes it and transforms information and then spits out
some sort of action.
And so, like, it's a very like, just fascinating process.
How the brain computes the information, the cells involved in that computation, and how
like cognition can arise from, like, a physical substrate.
A lot of being a scientist is sort of going out into the unknown, but like, when you're
in the classroom you read all these text books and they make it seem like everything is so
cut and dry, but once you start doing the science you realize that there are few things
that are actually so black and white.
That's like the first taste you have of this like uncharted territory.
So that's kind of like exciting, it is, it's exciting, it's a little terrifying, but yeah,
it's kind of like one of the reasons why, like, I do like what I do, you know.