FRANK ROGOZIENSKI/WONDERFUL MACHINEPhilip Low was born in Vienna, grew up in Paris, and went to college in Chicago. Mirroring his early-life peregrinations, Low’s research has led him from math to neuroscience to business. In the late 1990s, while completing his undergraduate mathematics degree at the University of Chicago, Low spent a summer doing cancer research at Harvard Medical School. “Having worked in math and physics for most of my undergraduate years, studying something that was alive was very refreshing,” he says.
While the experience motivated him to pursue a career in biology, he got a sense that applying his computational skills to neuroscience would be more fruitful. “What I found from neuroscientists was they were excited to have mathematicians among them,” he says. METHODS: For graduate school, Low went to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to study sleep patterns in zebra finches in the lab of Terry Sejnowski.1 While there he also seized upon a neuroscience problem for which math would come in handy: sleep analysis often required labor-intensive interpretations of data, and Low set out to develop an algorithm that could map sleep stages automatically. “I locked myself on the fifth floor of the Salk Institute and emerged with the solution 3 years later,” ...
