Dr. Alan Rorie is a designer, fabricator, coder, artist and scientist. His art work focuses on the intersection between science, art and education. He founded Almost Scientific, a science and art collaborative, after someone told him his method of producing art was “very scientific.” “I know how science works,” he replied. “This isn’t scientific–it’s almost scientific.” Since then, Almost Scientific has educated scientists about art and artists about science, helping to bring forth such works as gigantic interactive treehouses, large sets of functional brass apertures, fully functional, steam-powered time machines, alien observation tanks housing 9000-volt robotic neurons, and plasma powered rocket ships.Alan’s individual and collaborative works have been shown at venues as diverse as The Sonoma County Museum, The Exploratorium, Maker Faire, Coachella Music Festival, the Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival, The Science Gallery’s Lightwave Event, the Edwardian Ball and Burning Man. His art has been featured in the science journal Nature, the technology and culture publication Wired, and a wide array of blogs and web-pages. And, his scientific work has been published in Science, PLoS and The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.After graduating NYU with BS in Neuroscience, Alan became a pre-doctoral researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. Alan completed his Ph.D in Neurobiology at Stanford University in 2008, where he studied how monkey neurons make economic decisions, and recently completed a post doctoral fellowship at The Exploratorium, the museum of science, art and human perception, located in San Francisco.Specialties: Neurobiology; cognitive neuroscience; computational neurobiology; human psychology, perception and cognition; behavioral economics and decision making; general chemistry, biology and physics