Name: Adam Stocker
Hometown: Orrville, Ohio
Hobbies: Brazilian jiu-jitsu and playing with my daughter
What do you study? I study how the brain develops. But that’s a really big problem, so I just study how the different sense areas of the brain are made. For an example, the area of your brain that figures out what you see is always at the back of the brain (in everybody). We’re trying to figure out how the back part of your brain knows to become the area that is responsible for sight.
Why is it important? If we can understand how the brain is made, we can understand how it goes wrong in a lot of different brain diseases and disorders. The hope is, if we know what happens when it goes wrong, then we may be able to fix it (though this will take a while because the brain is really complicated).
What do you like about being a scientist? I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out the answers to these really big and complicated problems. But I can try to answer these problems any way I like, as long as I can explain why the methods I used work and why they’re a good way to answer the question. So getting to attack these complicated problems however I want is a lot of fun.