Please join us for our winter Growing Up in Science event! We are delighted to welcome Randall O’Reilly, visiting Radboud Excellence Professor and Senior Scientist at the Astera Institute, to share his scientific and personal journey through psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
A physics student walks into a psychology library by accident… It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but it is exactly how Randy’s career in neuroscience started. As a physics undergraduate at Harvard, Randy accidentally wandered into the psychology library (this was in a time where you had to physically visit libraries to discover stuff), where he realised that psychology sounded much more interesting than quantum mechanics. This serendipitous encounter eventually led him to the world of neural networks, long before “AI” was a household term.
Randy’s path included a rejected graduate school application, a year volunteering in a lab, and finally, a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University under the mentorship of James McClelland, pioneer of connectionist modeling. Over the years, Randy has held faculty positions at the University of Colorado Boulder and UC Davis, bridging psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. Now at the Astera Institute, he enjoys an enviable degree of scientific freedom—pursuing whatever questions most excite him (and, yes, getting paid for it). Along the way, he has learned that persistence pays off: what he considers his most important paper took seven years and multiple submissions before finally being published!
Join us to hear how chance, persistence, and a good library wander can shape a career. As always, questions are warmly encouraged! Hope to see you there and for drinks afterwards! what he considers his most important paper took seven years and multiple submissions before finally being published.
Join us to hear how chance, persistence, and a good library wander can shape a career. As always, questions are warmly encouraged. Hope to see you there and for drinks afterwards!
Growing Up In Science (GUIS)
GUIS events happen 2-3 times per year and are open to anyone, from MSc student to PI. At a typical GUIS event, a colleague shares their life story, with a focus on struggles, failures, doubts, detours, and weaknesses. The format of these events are free-flowing, informal, and personal interviews, where common topics include dealing with expectations, impostor syndrome, procrastination, luck, rejection, conflicts with advisors, and work-life balance, but these topics are always embedded in the speaker's broader narrative.