Interdisciplinary poster presentations & Symposium

On Tuesday June 6th, the SHA symposium took place at the Koningsberger building. This symposium consisted of several plenary speakers and the poster presentation from the students who participated in the SHA interdisciplinary projects. The evening started off with the first speaker, René van Roij, professor in soft-Matter theory at the institute for theoretical physics in Utrecht. He gave a presentation about Entropy: ‘How much do you know when you only know a little bit?’. In this field where theoretical physics and computer sciences come together, the handling of information leads to interesting problems.

After the first speaker, it was time for the interdisciplinary poster presentations. At this poster market, student who participated in the interdisciplinary project had the chance to show their research to their fellow students and teachers and discuss their findings. The topics of these projects included ‘Cultured meat’, ‘Human life on mars’, ‘Neuroimaging of pain perception’ and ‘Optimization of bionic body parts’. During these presentations everyone was able to see what their fellow students had been working for the past months and the participants could receive valuable research to make last improvements to their paper.

The next speaker was dr. Qingyi Feng, a complexity scientist with backgrounds in Climate Dynamics, Complex Systems Science and Environmental Science. She spoke about complexity: an interdisciplinary approach to (re)understand our world. After a nice dinner was enjoyed by all attending students, the symposium continued with the next lecture. Prof. dr. Serge Dumoulin, Professor of Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience, Experimental psychology in Utrecht, spoke about the Neuropsychology: Processing of visual information. In this interdisciplinary field psychology, biology and physics must come together to discover the working mechanism of the brain in the processing of visual information. This interesting lecture showed the amazing capability of the human brain to change and adapt all information provided by our eyes into one clear picture.

The evening was closed by the last speaker, dr. Gerard Tel from the department of Information and Computing Sciences. His lecture was about Cryptography: a connection between cryptography, number theory and theoretical computer science. All together, the symposium had an interesting combination of speakers from different disciplines and poster presentations by students.

Anniek Henselijn