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This article has been posted on behalf of Atreya Majumdar. Atreya is a second-year PhD student in Damien Querlioz' lab at Université Paris-Saclay.  

Starting a PhD can be intimidating—the transition from writing exams with a pre-defined curriculum to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge is a big step for any student. From getting familiar with the basic terminologies to understanding the seminal contributions, a student’s first foray into research comes with a plethora of to-dos. What makes it especially challenging for new students of neuromorphic technology is that the field is intrinsically multidisciplinary, a potpourri of biology, engineering, physics, mathematics, machine learning etc.

This is where the Neurotech webinars come in!

Once every month, researchers from different avenues of this field give webinars on their topic of expertise. Each of these sessions centre around a question that aims to enlighten a certain perspective, which can be as fundamental as “What is Neuromorphic Engineering?” or as practical as “How to make money with Neuromorphic Computing?”.

The webinars start with a short presentation from each of the participating researchers followed by a panel discussion session where they address audience questions. Listening to both the webinars and the panels is very useful because it provides us with both familiarity and insight into the topics, even if they are not directly related to the topic of our PhD. The interaction session is even more helpful in the present circumstance when the coronavirus crisis has severely limited our ability to connect with others.

The presentation of the researchers of these webinars are recorded and the videos are available on the website. This is turning out to be a resource for researchers to comprehend topics outside their expertise, as well as a repository of lectures that can serve as an introduction to the field, for new PhD students of generations to come.