Watch the live webcast on this page on Wednesday, May 1 at 7 pm ET.

To make progress on serious problems in biology and medicine takes a combination of skills, tools, and approaches, often requiring collaboration across seemingly disparate fields. The trick to making breakthroughs often lies in learning to communicate across disciplines to identify existing technologies – and, crucially, the new tools that need to be invented.

Anne M. Andrews is a neuroscientist whose work eavesdrops on chemical signaling in the brain. Paul S. Weiss is a nanoscientist who studies materials at the smallest scales. Their scientific collaboration began by advancing nanotechnology to pursue grand challenges in neuroscience, bridging their two fields. This expansion of each of their efforts led to ongoing advances in biology and medicine.

In a special joint public lecture at Perimeter on May 1, Andrews and Weiss will describe their motivation and explain how they are training new generations of students and fellow researchers to look beyond traditional academic boundaries to target significant problems and to develop the necessary communication skills to address them.

Andrews is Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she leads basic and translational research on anxiety and depression, at the nexus of neuroscience and nanoscience.

She is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, President of the International Society for Serotonin Research, and Associate Editor for ACS Chemical Neuroscience. Among her many honours, Andrews has received both a Director’s Transformative Research Award and a Fellows Award for Research Excellence from the National Institutes of Health.

Weiss holds a UC Presidential Chair and is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry and of Materials Science & Engineering at UCLA.

He studies the ultimate limits of miniaturization, developing new tools and methods for atomic-resolution and spectroscopic imaging and chemical patterning. He applies these advances in other areas including neuroscience, microbiome studies, and high-throughput cell transfection.

Weiss has won awards in science, engineering, teaching, publishing, and communications. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, and American Chemical Society, among several others. He is also the founding and current editor-in-chief of ACS Nano.

Tickets to attend the talk in person will be available here on Monday, April 15 at 9 am ET.