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Distinguished Visiting Professor
2011
Stanislas Dehaene
Professor and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology, Collège de France, Paris, and Director, INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Orsay, France.
April 3 - 16, 2011
Professor Dehaene is one of Europe’s leading cognitive neuroscientists. His work uses advanced techniques in functional magnetic resonance imaging, electro-encephalography, interacranial electrodes, and psychological manipulations to study how culture and biology interact in the human brain. He is internationally known for his work on the neural bases of reading abilities, mathematical language, bilingualism, and consciousness. In his acclaimed recent book, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Cultural Invention, Professor Dehaene examines the brain circuitry at work behind reading and describes groundbreaking research on how the brain processes languages. He proposes a powerful "neuronal recycling" hypothesis, which postulates that cultural inventions invade evolutionarily older brain circuits, and while doing so inherit many of their structural constraints. In The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge Is Embedded in Our Brains, Stanislas Dehaene argues that humans have an inbuilt "number sense" capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems begin when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.
Click here to watch a video interview with Professor Dehaene courtesy of the French Consulate, Vancouver.
Philippe Sansonetti
Professor and Chair, Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, Collège de France, and Professor, Pasteur Institute, Paris.
June 14 - 24, 2011
Philippe Sansonetti is one of Europe’s leading microbiologists. His research mainly focuses on the understanding of several aspects of the pathogenesis of Shigella, a Gram-negative bacterium causing severe diarrhea. This work spans a large set of disciplines in biology and medicine and ranges from molecular genetics, to cell biology, immunology and the development of vaccines against dysentery. He also actively contributes to the development of vaccine candidates against the major shigellae causing dysentery in the developing world.
Philippe Sansonetti received Biochemistry/Microbiology and Medical degrees from the University of Paris VII. After conducting research in the Department of Enteric Diseases at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Washington DC, he returned to the Pasteur Institute, where he eventually created and headed the Unité de Pathogénie Microbienne Moléculaire. He then practised medicine before becoming head of the out-patient Clinic, then medical director, at the Pasteur Hospital. He has also held several scientific administration positions at INSERM, French Ministry of Research and Technology, as well as at the World Health Organization where he chaired the Steering Committee on Diarrheal Diseases.
While spending time at the Wall Institute, Professor Sansonetti will, among other things, give a formal talk on the intestinal mucosal surface in addition to a number of public lectures on Shigella. He will collaborate closely with Brett Finlay and the Michael Smith Laboratories.
Click here to watch a video interview with Professor Sansonetti courtesy of the French Consulate, Vancouver.
2010
Barbara J. Grosz
Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Professor, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
June 21 - 25, 2010
Barbara J. Grosz is dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Before becoming dean, she served as the Institute's interim dean in 2007 and as Radcliffe's first dean of science from 2001 to 2007. In this latter role she designed and built its science program. Dr. Grosz has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1986 and has led several Harvard efforts aimed at increasing the participation of women in science. Her research in computer science, focused on finding ways to make computers behave more intelligently, draws also on work in linguistics, psychology, economics, and philosophy. In 2009, she received the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell award for her highly interdisciplinary research, including her pioneering contributions to improving human-computer communication. Dr. Grosz is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1993, she became the first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Dr. Grosz serves on the executive committee and is a former trustee of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.
2009
Alain Berthoz
Professor of Physiology, Collège de France
September 1 - 30, 2009
An internationally-renowned neurophysiologist and an expert on perception and movement, Alain Berthoz holds the Chair in Physiology of Perception and Action at the Collège de France in Paris, and is Director of the Laboratory of Physiology of Perception and Action. Through brain imaging, recording movements, and the use of virtual reality, Prof. Berthoz and his research team study the neural basis of four major types of cognitive- motor functions: eye movements, generation of locomotion trajectories, strategies for cognitive spatial memory, and perception and expression of emotions and actions of others.
During his month-long stay in September, Professor Berthoz pursued a scholarly agenda and participated in Institute programs and events. Among other events, Professor Berthoz gave a Faculty Associates Forum talk, two public talks, and participated in many research discussions, including with the Wall Major Thematic Grant on Sensorimotor Computation. He co-organised with Dinesh Pei, PI of the Wall Major Thematic Grant on Sensorimotor Computation, a two-day MTG workshop held at the Collège de France in May 2010: 'The Control of Gaze'.
Professor Berthoz returned to the Peter Wall Institute in September 2011. His return visit was co-sponsored by the UBC Brain Research Centre.
2008
Roald Hoffmann
1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Writer
March 3 - 7, 2008
Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).
Notable at the same time is his reaching out to the general public; he participated, for example, in the production of a television course in introductory chemistry titled "The World of Chemistry," shown widely since 1990. And, as a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and three books, Chemistry Imagined with artist Vivian Torrence, The Same and Not the Same and Old Wine (translated into six languages), New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt.
Hoffmann is also an accomplished poet and playwright. He began writing poetry in the mid-1970s, eventually publishing the first of a number of collections, The Metamict State, in 1987, followed three years later by Gaps and Verges, then Memory Effects (1999), Soliton (2002), and most recently, in Spanish, Catalista. He has also co-written a play with fellow chemist Carl Djerassi, entitled Oxygen, which has been performed worldwide, translated into ten languages. His second play, "Should've", is a play about the social responsibility of scientist and artists. It debuted at the 41st Annual International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Congress in Turin, Italy.
The Vancouver premiere of Should've the week of March 3, 2008 at UBC's Frederic Wood Theatre created the occasion for the visit of Dr. Hoffmann to the Institute as 2008 Wall Distinguished Visiting Professor. Among other contributions in the space of one extraordinary week, he attended the Institute reception and opening night of the play, participated in the talk-back session and gala reopening of the Department of Chemistry’s heritage building that followed; gave a Wall Associates Forum lunch talk, and a lecture at the Department of Chemistry; and led a Wall Fireside Chat on topics that ranged from chemistry to poetry.
2005
Arif Dirlik
Professor Emeritus, History, Duke University
October 23 - November 17, 2005
Professor Dirlik is a distinguished intellectual historian of modern China and of revolutionary thought, a noted critic of the Age of Global Capitalism, and an international expert on Asia-Pacific as a space of cultural production. He has been remarkably engaged in nurturing new areas of inquiry and new scholars by organizing workshops and symposia, editing special issues of journals and heading book series for Rowman & Littlefield, SUNY, and Duke University; participating on editorial and advisory boards of several dozen journals and series in a diverse range of fields; and contributing key note addresses at conferences and seminars around the world. His published articles and chapters, including on subjects outside the China and Asia-Pacific field, such as "The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of Indigenous Historicism," American Indian Culture and Research Journal (1996), republished in Troy R. Johnson (ed), Contemporary Native American Political Issues (1997), are seminal contributions in dozens of fields.
Born in Mersin, Turkey, Arif Dirlik took a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Robert College, Istanbul (1964) and a PhD in History at the University of Rochester (1973). A member of the History faculty at Duke University from 1971 to 2001, he moved to the University of Oregon in 2001 as Knight Professor of History and Anthropology, Director of the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies, and member of the Executive Committee of the Comparative Literature Program.
At the Institute, he completed his book on Global Modernity and held an all-day workshop that discussed various chapters in the book. He returned to the Institute for a book launch in the fall of 2006. He co-directed the Wall Summer Institute for Research "The End of the Peasant?" in 2008 and the follow-up retreat in 2009 in Hong Kong and Beijing.
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