Every academic should be able to excite and inform people about their work within 30 seconds, and give additional details within 2 minutes. I wrote an "elevator speech" for a science communication class I'm sitting in on.

My 30 second elevator speech

My name is Ben, I'm a post-doc in computer science. What fascinates me is that while our mind *feels* like a unified whole, our brain comes in two separable halves that have different specialties. For example, only the left side speaks, while the right side is best at recognizing faces. But things aren't straightforward: if you lose one side in childhood, the other side can learn all functions. If you remove the direct connection between the two, each can operate on it's own.

I use public data and open-source programming to address three questions: what makes the two sides of the brain see the world differently, see faces differently? How do the two sides interact to figure out what you're seeing? And why do people vary how strong these differences are?

My 2 minute continuation

When I started graduate school, I was kind of shocked by how scientists use data. Lots of times scientist collect the data and analyze it but then publish their analyses *discard the data*--the thing I think is the science.

I build tools to make public data easy to access and to make MRI brain analysis more accessible to non-experts with data analysis skills--like me. I use those tools to look at how differences in the anatomy of the brain inter-relate: if the front part of the brain is bigger on the right for someone, does that predict whether the back left will also be bigger? If language function is more lateralized, does that predict whether spatial attention is more lateralized? I also mine quantitative data from the literature and build open-source computer models of what *might* make the two hemispheres see faces differently and how the two sides *might* interact, to test texty theories and suggest which expensive, time-consuming experiment might be worth doing.