Biography:

Dr. Stephen G. Odaibo is a Nigerian-born Physician, Mathematician, Computer scientist, Neuroscientist, Physicist, and Retina specialist. He won the 2005 Barrie Hurwitz Award for Excellence in Clinical Neurology at Duke University School of Medicine where he topped the class in Neurology. Dr. Odaibo is Chief Scientist and Founder of Quantum Lucid Research Laboratories, an Independent Computational Research Institute. He is also a Retina specialist at the Medical Associates Clinic in Dubuque Iowa.Dr. Odaibo obtained a B.S. in Mathematics (UAB, 2001), M.S. in Mathematics (UAB, 2002), M.S. in Computer Science (Duke, 2009), and Doctor of Medicine--MD (Duke, 2010). From 2004 to 2006, Dr. Odaibo was in the lab studying G-protein coupled receptors with Robert J. Lefkowitz, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. Dr. Odaibo completed his Internship in Internal Medicine at Duke University Hospital (Durham) in 2011, his Residency in Ophthalmology at Howard University Hospital (Washington DC) in 2014, and his Fellowship in Medical Retina, Uveitis, and Ocular Oncology at the University of Michigan-Kellogg Eye Center (Ann Arbor) in 2015. He has published textbooks in advanced Mathematics and Physics. He is author of the book, ``Quantum Mechanics and the MRI Machine'' (Symmetry Seed Books, Oct 2012), and of the book "The Form of Finite Groups: A Course on Finite Group Theory" (Symmetry Seed Books, Jan 2016). Dr. Odaibo has received a number of recognitions and awards. He won the 2013 Best Resident Research Presentation Award at the 23rd Annual Washington Retina Symposium, for devising the Sinc wavelet, a mathematical model describing the behaviour of motion-processing neurons. In 2012 he was selected as a Featured Alumnus of the Mathematics Department at UAB. In Oct 2011 his cornea paper was selected by MIT Technology Review as one of the best papers from Physics or Computer science submitted to the arXiv. In that paper, Dr. Odaibo provided the first quantitative demonstration of non-paraxial light bending in the human cornea. Dr. Odaibo's research interest is Algebraic Structures, a branch of pure Mathematics. His clinical interests are in the diagnosis and Pharmacological/Laser management of retinal disease. The conditions he treats include macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, retinal vascular occlusions, retinal tears, and localized retinal detachments. He enjoys taking care of his patients, and feels truly blessed at the opportunity to provide them compassionate, evidence-based, state-of-the-art retina care. He loves his wife Lisa, his son Daniel, his family and friends, and studying the bible in its rich historical context.

Abstract:

Every time you look out at a visual scene, the neurons in your visual cortex respond in a certain way. They do so by changing their firing rate in response to the visual scene. Therefore each visual scene is represented in your brain by some specific pattern of neuronal firing. This is the neural code for vision. Understanding this code will potentially mean we can someday enable blind people see by stimulating the brain to represent the visual scene in their line of sight. In this talk, I will present some background on this problem, and I will discuss the subproblem of “cracking the code for visual motion”. In particular, I will present our research results about the behavior of motion-processing neurons in the visual cortex. And I will describe how at Quantum Lucid Research Labs, we are beginning to understand the code for neurons which help us see moving objects.