12th Annual Nornes Lectureship in Neuroscience
"Interpretable Machine Learning: How to Harness AI to Help Scientific Understanding, Not Replace It"
Keynote presented by Dr. Ben Calverley
Thursday, 18 March 2027, 7:00 p.m.
Knutson Campus Center Centrum
This event is free and open to the public.
Dr. Ben Calverley is a Staff Scientist in the lab of Dr. William Balch at Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA. Dr. Calverley is an interdisciplinary scientist whose work combines biology, mathematics, and machine learning to investigate complex biological systems. His research has included using computational and interpretable machine-learning approaches to understand relationships among genetic variation, biological function, and disease. His work is particularly relevant to neuroscience as researchers increasingly use machine learning to make sense of complex genomic, cellular, and physiological data.
Dr. Calverley earned his PhD in Quantitative and Biophysical Biology from the University of Manchester, his Master of Mathematics from the University of Oxford, and his Master of Science in Theoretical Physics from King’s College London.
Can AI really replace human scientists? Should we be worried about AI hallucinations in research? How does it all actually work? Join Dr Ben Calverley to discuss how machine learning is used in scientific research, how that is changing with the onset of AI advances, and why interpretability is so important to computational and theoretical understanding in neuroscience, biology, and beyond. We will examine key examples of the cutting edge of machine learning in the life sciences today, from protein structure mapping to neuro-imaging analysis to predicting function and response to treatments. And finally, in the age of the LLM, we discuss how we can make sure that advances in AI help scientific understanding and human reasoning, not replace or diminish it.
Explore more of Dr. Calverley's work by clicking on the images below.
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