Título: The idea of the Brain.

Conferenciante: Matthew Cobb, Profesor de Zoología, Universidad de Manchester, Reino Unido

Fecha: 19 de Abril

Hora: 12.30h

Lugar: Aula Magna de la Facultad de Medicina

Biographic sketch: Matthew Cobb is a British zoologist and Professor of zoology at the University of Manchester. He is known for his popular science books, among them, “The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth” (2007); “Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code” (2015); and “The Idea of the Brain: A History” (2020).

Cobb earned his BA in Psychology at the  University of Sheffield. During the second year of his undergraduate studies he read an article about the then recent discovery of the  Drosophila melanogaster dunce mutant and decided to focus on behaviour genetics in fruit flies, later saying he, "went on to do my PhD there, in Psychology and Genetics, looking at the mating behaviour of seven species of fruitfly. Psychology in those days was as much about animal behaviour as it was about human psychology, and I was lucky enough to be in one of the few places in the UK that studied it.”

From 1981 to 1984, Cobb conducted human twin studies at London's Institute of Psychiatry, research he later described as trying "to get human twins drunk”. He has said, "This was interesting, but convinced me that I did not want to do research on human beings. In 1984, he obtained funding through the  Royal Society's Science Exchange Programme to work with Jean-Marc Jallon in  Gif-sur-Yvette, France, where he was introduced to the use of pheromones and smell by animals as a means of communication. Subsequently, Cobb spent a year and a half working at the Sorbonne Paris Nordin Villetaneuse, where he lectured in Psychophysiology. In 1998, he joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), working first at its Orsay facility, utilising Drosophila maggots to study the sense of smell, and from 1995 at its Laboratoire d'Ecologie in Paris where he investigated olfactory communication in ants. Since 2002, Cobb has worked at the University of Manchester, initially as a lecturer in animal behaviour and later as professor of zoology.