A physicist in the neurobiology lab

After 10 years as a theoretical particle physicist, Larry Abbott discovered a new passion. Most of us hope that we’ll eventually figure out what we want to do when we grow up. For former theoretical particle physicist Larry Abbott, that “Aha!” moment came about 26 years ago, when, at the age of 39, he stepped into neurobiologist Eve Marder’s laboratory, where experiments were taking place to study a small neural circuit. “One of the postdocs took me into the rig and showed me the neuro...