Michael O’Shea is Professor of Neuroscience and co-Director of the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in the UK.  Before taking up his present position he was Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago in the USA.  He held Research Fellowships at the University of Cambridge and the University of California at Berkeley.  He is author of more than 100 scholarly articles on cellular, molecular and computational neuroscience and biologically inspired robotics.  In the interests of the public understanding of science (and the scientist’s understanding of the public) he authored “The Brain – A Very Short Introduction” published by Oxford University Press.  He is a keen amateur astronomer and an armchair philosopher.