Current and Upcoming Visitors

Raquel Fernández is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Dialogue Systems at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. She received her PhD from King's College London and before moving to Amsterdam held research positions at Stanford University and the University of Potsdam. She is currently the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant. Raquel’s interests revolve around language use in interaction, conversational AI, language variability and change, and visually grounded language. Her research lab carries out work on these topics at the interface of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Personal Website

Rachel is an evolutionary microbiologist interested in antimicrobial resistance evolution, interactions in the microbiome, pathogen evolution during infections, and bacterial defence systems such as CRISPR-Cas. Rachel is a Fellow in Biology at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College), and taking up a tenure-track position at Queen's University Belfast in 2024. She is particularly interested in the interface between antibiotic resistance evolution and success in the microbiome. Prior to her current position, she spent time at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study) and as a postdoc in the lab of Professor Craig MacLean. Outside of science, she enjoys judo, boxing, and running! Personal Website

Shinichi Aizawa is Professor Emeritus at the Prefectural University of Hiroshima currently visiting OIST through the Visiting Program (TSVP). He is considered one of the world’s foremost experts in the structure and function of bacterial flagella. His contributions to solving flagellar polymorphism are very highly regarded, and his book “The Flagellar World” has become a standard textbook in the field. After studying at Tohoku and Nagoya Universities in Japan, he spent several years as a Postdoc at Yale University. His long career in academia included positions at Research & Development Corporation of Japan (now JST) in Tsukuba, Teikyo University, University of Hawaii, Flinders University in Australia, and Martin-Luther University Halle in Germany.

Lucy Lai is a final-year neuroscience Ph.D. student at Harvard, advised by Sam Gershman. Her research applies information theory and reinforcement learning towards understanding how humans learn and make decisions under cognitive resource constraints. In particular, she has developed a resource-rational model of action selection to characterize decision-making in healthy and clinical populations. A restless researcher at heart, she has spent time at Baylor College of Medicine, MIT, Janelia Research Campus, and UCL. At OIST, she will be collaborating with the Tripp and Doya Units to develop computational models of reward learning in children with ADHD. In addition to research, Lucy is also passionate about education and mentoring: she has developed and taught many courses, including Math Tools for Neuroscience and How Music Plays the Brain, and served as a Resident Tutor at Quincy House, where she lived with and advised Harvard undergraduate students. Personal Website

Daniel Chourrout has established the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in 1997 and been its director until 2020. This institute is a Partner of EMBL, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory since 2023. His own research is focused on the evolution of chordate development, using tunicates as model systems. Before moving to Norway, Daniel Chourrout was heading the Laboratory of Fish Genetics at INRA (French Institute of Research for Agriculture). His training is in Genetics from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.