Pranab Das participates in major planning initiative on 'The Physics of Life and the Mind'

Pranab Das, professor of physics at Elon, was part of a small group of invited scholars who met in New York last weekend with the goal of identifying areas within “The Physics of Life and the Mind” which are promising enough to merit a major infusion of research funding.

The John Templeton Foundation organized this gathering of 16 researchers who each presented their work and spent three days in collaborative discussions. The goal of this project is to ascertain whether the physical basis of life and mind would be a fertile target for a major new funding initiative possibly totaling in the tens of millions of dollars and, if so, to refine particular focal topics.

The other invitees’ areas of expertise ranged from the study of exoplanets to robotics, philosophy, nanoscience and biophysics.

Elon was in good company. The other universities represented were Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Cornell, Notre Dame, Durham (UK), Sydney, Glasgow, BU, Arizona State and Chicago,