A scientific polymath paves her own path to intellectual freedom

A scientist’s career can take many forms. Most commonly, researchers focus on a very specific system, like the interactions between tuberculosis-causing bacteria and the immune system, or a single natural phenomenon, like the climate change-driven spread of invasive species. Others master a core process, like genetic modification, and partner with other scientists to apply their knowledge to a variety of problems.

Stephanie Palmer, PhD, sees herself in a different mold. “Digging into one system or one question for your career is a completely wonderful way to do science,” she said. “It's just not how I do science.”

Palmer’s work sits at the intersection of biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science. When pressed to define her research in a single sentence, she says it mostly focuses on how animals’ visual systems help them make predictions about what’s happening next in their environment. That starting point has led her down many paths, from studying how salamanders anticipate movements of their prey to circadian rhythms, cephalopod camouflage, and color vision in butterflies. If she had to give herself a label, she might call herself a theoretical neuroscientist, but now she has a more appropriate description: polymath.

Palmer was recently named one of six new awardees of the Schmidt Science Polymath Program, which supports creative, recently tenured professors with multidisciplinary track records and research ideas that cross field boundaries. Each awardee receives up to $2.5 million over five years to support research groups by funding students and postdocs or acquiring equipment and resources.

Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to advance science and technology that deepens human understanding of the natural world and develops solutions to global issues. The Polymath Program is intended to help awardees to pursue risky, novel theories that would otherwise be difficult to fund through traditional federal sources — exactly the kind of work Palmer likes to do.

“Of all the grants and fellowships I could have applied for, I feel like this call was written for me,” she said. “To me, polymath means that you are versed in many different fields, and that is how I organize my thinking. I love a constant unmooring from things that I know to work on something new.”

Unexplored territory and the pioneer spirit

Palmer can trace her broad interests to her parents, two “delightfully odd ducks” who modeled two very different kinds of careers. Her mother was a high school English teacher who read voraciously and wrote poetry in her spare time; her father, an aerospace engineer. At times, Palmer was drafted as the intra-parent translator, a skill that came in handy later as she made friends and explored a wide range of interests.

As an undergraduate at Michigan State University, she started out on a pre-med track, but quickly realized she enjoyed chemistry and physics through a research assistantship. After graduating with a degree in chemical physics, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford University, where she pursued a DPhil (the Oxford and Cambridge equivalent to a PhD) in theoretical physics. It was there in the graduate hall of residence at Oxford, where students from all fields of study lived together, that she employed her social skills to start building a multidisciplinary network of future colleagues.

“I learned from this incubator how to talk about different fields and also about the range of questions good scholarship can address, from law and classics to math and neuroscience,” she wrote in her application for the Schmidt Polymath program. “I have carried that experience and those relationships with me throughout my career.”

Palmer’s time at Oxford could have built the foundation for a successful career as a theoretical physicist; while there, she discovered the configuration state of a peculiar magnetic crystal, now named the Palmer-Chalker state after her and her advisor John Chalker. But while talking to friends who worked in a neuroscience lab, she was compelled to make another career shift. Her physics work was interesting, but the path felt well-worn. By contrast, in neuroscience, “the sheer number of open questions appealed to me, as did the pioneer spirit of breaking off into largely unexplored territory,” she wrote.

Palmer next took a postdoctoral research position at the University of California, San Francisco that was specifically designed to bring theoretical physicists and mathematicians into neuroscience. The transition was exciting but daunting. She threw herself headlong into learning everything she could about the brain and nervous system, from attending more graduate courses to shadowing a friend doing autopsies for their pathology internship. She spent three years doing nitty gritty experimental work to record brain activity from songbirds while they learned and refined their songs. After this work ended in frustrating, largely negative results, she changed course again to tackle the visual system in the retina, moving to another postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University for her last stop before coming to UChicago in 2012, where she is now an Associate Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy.

‘Bringing intuition into equation land’

At UChicago, Palmer continued her work on the retina, but true to form, it wasn’t just about that very specific set of cells at the back of an eyeball. Instead, she used it as an entry point into understanding how the brain makes calculations that guide behavior in complex, ever-changing environments.

Some of the most important calculations are predictions about objects moving in the field of vision. Animals like salamanders track prey, like insects buzzing nearby, to calculate their flight path and pick just the right time to lunge forward and snatch a meal. This might seem like pure reflex, but it involves a lot of computations in both the retina and the brain.

In a series of publications, Palmer and her team showed they could capture how animals like the salamander encoded the optimal calculations for making these predictions first in the retina, and that they can be described by a few simple, biologically plausible rules. They also showed how animals filter the information overload of a natural environment to select the most important inputs for making decisions, and how they can use this information for complex behaviors like escaping predators and capturing prey.

Palmer says her physics background lends itself well to this kind of work, offering insight into the structural properties and physical constraints of things like the networks of neurons needed to calculate visual predictions. That training also helps fold in the more abstract world of mathematics — the equations needed to parse data and make sense of the natural world.

“I think theoretical physicists are good at bringing intuition into equation land. It’s the intellectual way you work, or the way you think, that is the most portable thing from physics into biology for me,” she said.

This way of thinking provided more opportunities for Palmer in 2023, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched two major initiatives based at UChicago. The first, called the Center for Living Systems, is one of four Physics Frontier Centers the NSF launched that year. Its goal is establishing a new field of physics that focuses on how living matter can store, retrieve, and process information. Palmer is one of the major activity co-leaders for the center, lending her expertise on the origins of adaptive mechanisms and computation in complex mechanisms.

The second opportunity, announced just two days later, is the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB), a joint effort between UChicago and Northwestern University supported by the NSF and the Simons Foundation. The institute, which is the first of its kind in the US, will build a nationwide research community to uncover the “rules of life” through new mathematical theories, data models, and computational and statistical tools. Palmer is the is associate director of training for the NITMB, tasked with creating new ways to teach and share mathematical concepts with the public, by linking them to familiar biological and natural phenomena we experience every day.

Michael Coates, PhD, Chair of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago, said Palmer brings a new dimension of integrative biology to an already very outward-looking department. “Her creative approach fits remarkably well within a community of biologists exploring innovation and diversity,” he said. “The quality of Stephanie’s research speaks for itself, both in the attention it gains and the collaborative links it generates.

In addition to her research, Coates says Palmer is also a very generous and gifted educator. Her introduction to research class for graduate students in the department creates a shared forum for paleontologists, neurobiologists, biomechanists, and developmental biologists, and the theoretical, mathematical thread she adds to the discussion is “a quintessentially ‘Palmeresque’ touch,” Coates said.

Turning to bigger research questions

The Schmidt Polymath Program seems perfectly designed for someone with Palmer’s varied interests, but it does come with stipulations. Any projects supported by the award can’t be the type of research that could be funded through traditional federal sources, like the NSF or National Institutes of Health. She says that won’t be a problem. “I like having a project you work on for about eight months, publish the result, and then look for a new thing to do.”

She doesn’t intend to leave her work on computation behind, but instead expand it to bigger questions about how organisms evolved the ability to perform those calculations — discovering not just how the salamander tracks a fly, but how its environment drove the adaptations that let it figure out where the fly is going next.

Her first proposed project will examine the evolution of neural computation in color vision for butterflies. Palmer’s team will work with Marcus Kronforst, PhD, who has extensively studied the genetic basis of wing patterns and mimicry in butterflies and how mate preferences evolve in response. They hope to uncover how mate selection preferences in male butterflies are changed by modifications to their visual system, and if these changes expand or limit how the butterfly can identify preferred wing patterns of potential mates.

“Working with Stephanie has been incredible. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to her for her adventurous spirit in taking on this project and for her incredibly broad knowledge base,” said Kronforst, who is a Professor of Ecology & Evolution at UChicago. “She’s a major resource to students and researchers across the biological sciences at UChicago who study neuroscience, vision, movement, and color. Her knowledge, enthusiasm, and generosity in discussing and studying these topics is really quite remarkable.”

Palmer’s next proposed project will explore a more elemental system — the circadian rhythms of bacteria, to see how their environment shapes computation and the ability to migrate to new habitats. All organisms have internal clocks that synchronize with signals from their environment, like daylight during a 24-hour period. Some of Palmer’s early research shows that bacteria use external light signals to shape the rhythms of their internal clocks, like when to crank up or turn down their metabolism. She wants to work with other experts on this phenomenon, including Michael Rust, PhD, Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, to collect data and develop new frameworks for how circadian rhythms change with the environment over time.

Intellectual freedom and joy of learning

Palmer says that at certain points in her career, different mentors have advised against indulging in such a wide range of interests. Stick to one topic, build up a body of published work, and then maybe branch out once you’ve achieved tenure and job security. But she also remembered what Bill Bialek, her postdoc advisor at Princeton, told her. “He reminded me that I've always been like this, and it's a selling point. He basically said, ‘it makes you different.’”

After nearly 12 years at UChicago, she doesn’t regret her choices.

“So far, it works. I’ve had some success. My postdocs have been able to get jobs. So, I feel good that my taste has been solid,” she said. “When you have good math skills, you can make a living doing a lot of things. But this is why I wanted this job, for the intellectual freedom and the joy of learning and doing new things.”