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 said she 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.
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 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.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
