About Adrienne

Dr. Adrienne Fairhall is a computational neuroscientist at the University of Washington. Growing up in Australia, Adrienne was a self-described “dreamer” who liked spending time alone, though that was rarely possible because she was one of four siblings close in age to each other. As a kid, she enjoyed science-play--growing crystals, dissecting cocoons, playing with soap bubbles, collecting moss. She always enjoyed math, and in early high school she began to take physics more seriously when she trained to become an “explainer” at the science center in her hometown. Her father took her to a special series of physics lectures that would help her explain tough physics concepts to the public. The whole thing entranced her so she kept studying physics through college and graduate school, working on understanding the formation of the beautiful patterns in turbulent fluids. For fun, she has always loved to read and still does. She also loves hiking... when she is lucky enough to convince someone to go with her!

After finishing her studies she thought it would be exciting to use the methods she’d learned about to try to work out the physics of the brain. While “how do we think” might seem like a question that only a psychologist could answer, it’s really one that needs many kinds of scientists to work together. While “thinking” is quite an abstract thing, it happens inside a very non-abstract thing-- the tissues of our brain. The brain is made of billions of cells called neurons that have the special property that they are “excitable”--they generate electrical signals--and that are connected together through connections called synapses. While we are watching movies, listening to music, playing sports, or wondering what to eat for lunch, our brain is full of complex patterns of electrical activity sparking in these billions of neurons.

Understanding those patterns and what they mean are questions that need input from biologists, to figure out how neurons work and are connected together and talk to one another, computer scientists to come up with ideas about the kinds of algorithms that a brain might use to do certain tasks, from physicists and engineers to help to build tools to be able to record and analyze all those signals, and from mathematicians and statisticians to help to interpret all that enormous amount of data. And scientists of all kinds need to collaborate to put this all together to come up with plausible models that can help us to explain how and why those patterns of activity carry out their jobs of sensing, deciding, calculating, feeling emotion, learning and moving.

Adrienne’s lab at UW focuses on theoretical and mathematical modeling and collaborates with a lot of different experimental labs to try to understand the “neural code”-- including a lab that records how mosquito brains detect carbon dioxide in order to find you, one that watches neurons flashing in a tiny transparent jellyfish, and another that records from monkey brains while they play video games. Together, Adrienne and her collaborators devise and apply mathematical models and data analysis to try to understand how different parts of the nervous system work, how animals behave and why, and ultimately how sensory systems turn input (like sights, sounds, smells etc) into outputs (decisions, behavior, physiological changes). She’s particularly interested in how the physical structure of the nervous system--the fact that the brain is made out of membranes and proteins and fats and water, not silicon like in a computer-- makes computation in the brain different from that in a computer simulation.