Official story
Adrienne Fairhall is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and adjunct in the Departments of Physics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington. She obtained her Honors degree in theoretical physics from the Australian National University and a PhD in statistical physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she worked on the statistics of turbulent plumes. In her postdoctoral work she transitioned to working on neural coding. She joined the UW faculty in 2004 and now co-directs the University of Washington's Computational Neuroscience Center. She has directed the MBL course, Methods in Computational Neuroscience, and co-directs the UW/Allen Workshop on the Dynamic Brain. She has held fellowships from Burroughs-Wellcome, the McKnight Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the Allen Family Foundation and was a Tocqueville-Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Ecole Normale Superieure in 2022. As a theorist, she collaborates with experimentalists working in a wide range of systems, from hydra to primates. Her work focuses on the interplay between cellular and circuit dynamics in neural computation, with a particular interest in adaptive and state-dependent neural coding.
Unofficial story
Adrienne grew up in Canberra, Australia; her mother was a country girl who did not finish high school, and her father was a civil servant who had taken his accounting degree at night while working full time. Her interest in science—and in science communication-- was stimulated through night lectures in physics at the Australian National University while training to work as a high school volunteer at Questacon, an Australian version of the Exploratorium. Adrienne thrived in her double major maths and physics classes at her Catholic girls’ high school, but the confidence gained by this experience crashed instantly in the first week of university honors maths when she encountered male bravado for the first time. After scrambling through sophomore and junior years to regain ground lost to panic, she graduated with first class honors in theoretical physics. A risk taker, she looked for a nontraditional place to study for a PhD in physics that would also allow discovery of the wider world, and baffled her family and friends by choosing the Weizmann Institute in Israel. This was in many ways a bigger challenge than she had anticipated, including arriving in the aftermath of the Gulf War and spectacularly failing a surprise entrance exam. After a very stressful but rich six years, when considering postdocs, Adrienne took another leap, this time toward neuroscience. An intensive course in computational neuroscience at Woods Hole led to life-changing opening of new areas of interest, a whirlwind post-course romance with her now husband of over 20 years, and the start of a postdoc with Bill Bialek in which she commenced the studies on adaptive coding with which she launched her lab at the University of Washington five years (and one baby) later. She has never taken a biology or a computer science class and is amazed to still have a job in her field.