Splash Biography

DAVID MAZUMDER, Princeton senior studying Molecular Biology

Major: Molecular Biology

College/Employer: Princeton

Year of Graduation: 2017

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Hey folks, I'm a senior from North Jersey with longtime interests in biology, neuroscience, music, history, and politics. I'm studying Molecular Biology at Princeton and am writing my senior thesis on the neural circuits underlying courtship behavior in fruit flies. Outside classes and the lab, I follow politics and enjoy playing with data on elections and demographics (and sing and play piano). I'd love to meet you and talk about gerrymandering!

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

X412: Democracy, Backwards in Splash Spring 2017 (Apr. 29, 2017)

Why are our elected representatives so bad at working together? Gerrymandering, where politicians redraw voting districts to pick their voters rather than the other way around, is a major force for polarization in Congress. How does gerrymandering affect the political process? How is it done? What counts as a gerrymandered district? What can we do about it? Join our discussion about some of the structural barriers to effective policy-making.

S341: Brainwaves: the Neuroscience of Making and Appreciating Music in Splash Spring 16 (Apr. 30, 2016)

Why do we enjoy music? What makes music so emotionally powerful? What drives us to make and listen to music? In this course on the neuroscience of music, we will discuss how the physical properties of sound are translated into signals in the brain, how the brain perceives the higher-level information -- including rhythm and melody -- that makes a sequence of sound "music", and lastly, how music affects our daily lives.

S267: What even is your mind? An introduction to consciousness in Splash Spring 15 (Apr. 25, 2015)

Curious about how it is that we are conscious? How do our minds construct a 3D picture of the world and place ourselves in it, colored by emotions and populated with thoughts and memories? How do we even define what consciousness really is? This course will introduce the current theories and recent experiments in neuroscience, philosophy, and computer science about the basis for consciousness, its uniqueness, and the extent to which it can be mimicked.