April 1, 2023 – UMass Neuroscience alum and McDonald’s Genius Award Winner, George Santos will be delivering the annual Laurel and Hardy Lecture in McGuirk Stadium. The title of his talk will be “The neural basis of confabulation”. Dr. Santos is well known for his discovery of the polio vaccine, his invention of the pipette, and his sequencing of the human proteome.
His more recent work has shown how humans are susceptible to false beliefs if uttered by someone who really believes them. Santos will be giving his lecture while immersed in a tank of sharks and playing a fiddle.
He is perhaps best known for an influential book, which he co-wrote with Richard Sutton, called “Reinforcement Learning” (MIT Press). The book, which is now in its 2nd edition is considered almost a sacred text by neuroscientists studying the neural basis learning as well as engineers and computer scientists who work on artificial intelligence.
