Stephanie E. Palmer

• Year

  2024

• Program

  Schmidt Science Polymaths

• Institution

  University of Chicago

• Field of Study

  Organismal Biology and Anatomy

• Location

  Chicago, USA

Stephanie Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on questions at the interface of neuroscience and statistical physics, exploring how the visual system processes incoming information to make fast and accurate predictions about the future positions of moving objects in the environment. Stephanie is part of the leadership teams for two new major efforts in Chicago at the interface of biology, physics, and mathematics: The NSF Center for Living Systems at the University of Chicago and the NSF-Simons Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology. Beginning in her undergraduate years at Michigan State University, Stephanie has been teaching chemistry, physics, math, and biology to a wide range of students. At the University of Chicago, she founded the Brains! Program, which brings local middle school students and science teachers from the South Side of Chicago to her lab to learn hands-on neuroscience.  Stephanie has a PhD in theoretical physics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2015, she was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and was granted a CAREER award from the NSF in 2017.