Meet the finalists

Nick Dickens | Nicholas Harrigan | Philip Jess | Caroline Johnson
Marieke Navin | Jan Schnupp | Peter Zeidman | Reserves

Jan Schnupp, Oxford Heat Winner

Originally from Munich, Jan is a researcher in neurobiology in the Department of Physiology, University of Oxford based at St. Peter’s College. Jan explained how speech and hearing work in order to win the Oxford heat.

How did you come up with your chosen subject matter at the FameLab heats?

Finding suitable topics is therefore not easy, and I spent a fair bit of time running through many options in my mind. If you only have 3 minutes, no visual aids, and you need to connect with a general audience, then you have to gloss over a lot of detail, but you still have to avoid giving a superficial talk. My experience as a scientist and lecturer helped a lot. It gives me a lot of material to choose from, and a feeling for what works and what doesn’t.

Did your presentation go according to plan?

Plan? Which plan? I guess I had a rough idea what I wanted to say, I said most of it, and I got through to the final. So in that sense, yes, it went to plan.

Please tell us what you feel your key skills are as a science communicator and why the public might respond well to you

I think good science communication is simply about using language that most people can relate to. Let me give you an example. If I were to say “Coulomb’s law states that the attraction between opposite charges is inversely proportional to the square of their distance”, then that would be accurate, but to most of us it sounds rather technical and dull. I could, however, get you to imagine the powerful, almost primal attraction that a dashing young electron feels when it senses the profoundly electrostatic loveliness emanating from a nearby proton. (Protons and electrons, you may remember, are minuscule sub-atomic particles that form the building blocks of all matter.) You can imagine Miss Proton blushing. The attraction is mutual. You can almost smell her perfume, at first only faintly, but growing stronger. As they inch closer, the attraction between them keeps growing rapidly, if they had a pulse it would now quicken, and you get the sense that if they could only get close enough to touch then surely this attraction would become unbearably, indeed infinitely strong. That, in a nutshell, is the poetry of Coulomb’s law. And once you appreciate that, you can begin to see that even the most banal lump of stuff in front of you must really be understood as a grand, elaborate dance of myriads of tiny particles incessantly flirting and courting with each other. Who said science isn’t sexy?

How did you get interested in science?

Already as a little kid, when I got into the ‘why?’ phase and started bugging people with endless questions, I found that I got much more satisfying answers out of people with scientific education than from people without. I never ‘decided’ I wanted to be a scientist, I just never grew out of that ‘why?’ phase and kept looking for ever more satisfying answers.

What do you do currently?

I spend about half of my time lecturing and the other half doing research. We have many research projects running. Some are on spatial hearing: how do you know where a sound comes from? Others are on pitch discrimination: if two very different musical instruments play the same note, you get two very different sounds. How do you now it’s the same note? We even do some work on rodent whiskers. Many animals, like rats, cats and even walrus, can feel their way around their environment using their whiskers. In order to do that, do they use similar brain mechanisms to those we use to see or hear? In the future I would like to do more work on auditory object recognition. How come you can recognize a dog bark as a dog bark, whether it’s a small dog or a big dog, close by or far away, even if you’ve never before heard that particular dog before? For our ears and brain this is a trivially easy thing to do, but working out how they do it turns out to be a fiendishly tricky scientific problem. Whether I will be able to make much of a dent in it remains to be seen, but it will be great fun trying.

Why does science excite and inspire you?

To me, ‘science’ is not something you do, but an attitude, one which invites you to lift the lid of things, look at things from different angles, dig a little deeper, engage not just your eyes and your analytical mind but also your imagination. If you dig deep enough, then you can discover profoundly amazing aspects to things that, on the surface, appear utterly mundane, like drying paint or rotting garbage. I guess science does for me what art does to people like Salvador Dali. It encourages me to search for richer, deeper ‘behind the scene’ glimpses of the world around me.

To date, what has been your most exciting scientific moment (other than being a FameLab finalist of course!)

It’s hard to name one single moment. There are quite a few. In my work I quite often get the chance to record the activity of living nerve cells through microelectrodes implanted in the brain of a rat or a ferret. Listening in on the chatter of nerve impulses of dozens of neurons as the brain tries to make sense of the sounds we play to it is always exciting.  (I hasten to add that the animals are anaesthetized when the electrodes are inserted and suffer no pain. Contrary to what some people may tell you, scientists are definitely not in the business of torturing little animals!)

Who are your favourite science communicators and why?

There are a number of masters of science communication who I admire, my former tutor Steve Jones among them. To my mind the grand master though was Germany’s late Hoimar von Ditfurth. When I was a kid in the late 1970s I devoured his book ‘Am Anfang war der Wasserstoff’ (‘In the Beginning was the Hydrogen’ - sadly I don’t believe there is an English edition.) It is basically the book of genesis retold. But rather than settling for a mere six days worth of magic sleight-of-hand by the almighty, it took me on a mind expanding 12 billion year journey, past swirling galaxies of a hundred billion stars, through the creation of the elements in the unimaginably hot furnaces of exploding super novae, the formation of planets and solar systems, the literally astronomically unlikely chain of events that kindled life on earth, and all the amazing zoo that evolved from that, from cyanobacteria to fish to apes like us, all carefully laid out in 395 pages of beautiful, captivating prose. It was quite stunning.

What are your ambitions for the future? Would winning FameLab have any impact on your plans?

My ambitions for the future? For starters I would like to live for ever. It’s not just that I’m afraid of dying (although that’s true too) but I am just so curious about what will happen next. And what will happen after that. And after that...  Winning FameLab is unlikely to help with that particular ambition, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to win it. I do! I think science has enriched our lives immeasurably, not just in practical terms, but also just in the pleasure that stems from the insights it can give us. I am therefore often surprised by how many people appear to be turned off by science or are even hostile to it. I love the challenge of convincing people that science is important, that it is fun, and that it is for everyone. Winning FameLab may give me an opportunity to reach out to larger and very different audiences, and that would be excellent.