Prof. Poo gave a lecture in Wuhan

On the morning of February 27^th, Prof. Mu-ming Poo of Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences gave a lecture on “Personal Notes on Scientific Research” at Hongshan Conference Center. This lecture was co-organized by Wuhan Branch, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, College of Life Sciences of Wuhan University. Academician Zuoyan ZHU from IHB hosted this lecture where more than 500 professors, teachers and students from institutes of Wuhan Branch, CAS and universities were present.

As most of the audiences were graduate students, Prof. Poo introduced five principles of graduate study for the first part of his lecture: 1. knowing how the facts were obtained is more important than the knowing the facts, 2. knowing how to find the facts is more important than knowing the facts, 3. knowing how to present the facts is as important as knowing the facts, 4. Knowing what’s unknown is more important than knowing what’s known, 5. Knowing how to educate yourself is more important than finding someone to educate you. For the second part of the lecture, Prof. Poo explained the exploratory research and hypothesis-driven research, prospective research and retrospective research for the audience and proposed six factors on innovative research, i.e. novelty, significance, continuity, uniqueness, completeness, timeliness. As for how to do creative work, he also summed up six factors, including broad scientific exposure, learning the history, selective reading, taking risk, positive attitude towards critiques, and learning from creative minds.

Wuchang is Prof. Poo’s mother’s hometown, so he began his lecture with a few sentences in Wuhan dialect which drew closer the relationship between him and the audience. Prof. Poo said that “part of the fun in science lies in the communication” and emphasized the significance of knowing the history of science. He pointed out that reading should be selective and “excessive reading is hazardous to your health!”

Prof. Poo was born in Nanjing (1948), graduated from the Department of Physics of Taiwan Tsing Hua University (1970), and received his Ph.D. in biophysics from John Hopkins University, Baltimore (1974). During 1996-2000, he held the Stephen W. Kuffler Chair in Neurobiology at University of California at San Diego and in 2000, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley.He is currently the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology and Head of Division of Neurobiology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. Since 1999, he has served as the founding Director of the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Head of the Laboratory of Neural Plasticity.

Prof. Poo is a world famous neurobiologist and biophysicist. His research interests focus on cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying axon guidance, synaptogenesis and synaptic plasticity. So far, he has published over 190 papers, among which 45 were published in Nature, Science, Cell and 44 were published in Neuron and other journals published on the behalf by the Nature Publishing Group.

A capacity crowd at the conference center

Students communicated with Prof. Poo