After a career spent probing the mysteries of the universe, a Janelia Research Campus senior scientist is now exploring the mysteries of the human brain and developing new insights into the connections between brain cells.
Tirthabir Biswas had a successful career as a theoretical high-energy physicist when he came to Janelia on a sabbatical in 2018. Biswas still enjoyed tackling problems about the universe, but the field had lost some of its excitement, with many major questions already answered.
“Neuroscience today is a little like physics a hundred years ago, when physics had so much data and they didn’t know what was going on and it was exciting,” says Biswas, who is part of the Fitzgerald Lab. “There is a lot of information in neuroscience and a lot of data, and they understand some specific big circuits, but there is still not an overarching theoretical understanding, and there is an opportunity to make a contribution.”
One of the biggest unanswered questions in neuroscience revolves around connections between brain cells. There are hundreds of times more connections in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way, but which brain cells are connected and why remains a mystery. This limits scientists’ ability to precisely treat mental health issues and develop more accurate artificial intelligence.
The challenge of developing a mathematical theory to better understand these connections was a problem Janelia Group Leader James Fitzgerald first posed when Tirthabir Biswas arrived in his lab.
While Fitzgerald was out of town for a few days, Biswas sat down with pen and paper and used his background in high-dimensional geometry to think about the problem — a different approach than that of neuroscientists, who typically rely on calculus and algebra to address mathematical problems. Within days, Biswas had a major insight into the solution and approached Fitzgerald as soon as he returned.
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