Dr. Sarkar is Professor of Integrative Biology and of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where he has taught since 1998. His laboratory focuses on spatial ecological planning and neglected tropical diseases including Chagas, Dengue, and Zika.  Dr. Sarkar discusses his work on the modification of transmission models for dengue to perform risk analyses for the emerging threat of Zika.  He also discusses Zika virus with its implications and transmission patterns in added detail.

Dr. Christopher Clack is a mathematician and research scientist for the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at Colorado University at Boulder.  He joins us to talk about his latest work of building an energy, well more specifically electric, simulator. Dr. Clack discusses how it allows us to seek out the most cost effective approach to rebuild the future energy system in a methodical calculated way. It is a model, so you can investigate almost infinite possibilities and display them for decision makers.

Dr. Nicolas Rougier is a full-time research scientist at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control.  During the past decades he’s been working extensively on visual attention in order to understand how we visually explore a scene.  Dr. Rougier discusses his work and  visual attention and computation neuroscience in particular.  He also dives deeper into how seeing is mostly an illusion and that we do not process all visual information that passed through our eyes and we're making deliberate (consciously or not) choices on what we concentrate.