A time traveler from the 1940s would find the modern kitchen mostly recognizable, which is unfortunate given how central cooking and eating are to the human experience. Technology has improved so many other aspects of society that it's puzzling why the kitchen has been resistant to change. Indeed, popular trends in cooking represent a retreat to anachronistic techniques in the belief that the past has more to offer than the future. In his talk, Young will offer a more optimistic vision for the future of the kitchen that his company is pursuing; a future where cooking tools learn to adapt to our individual needs and preferences and make it easier to cook the perfect meal. He will share some of what his team has learned from the millions of meals their customers have cooked and how their algorithms are leveraging ideas from applied mathematics, statistics, physics, and chemistry to do something as seemingly simple as poaching an egg.

Chris Young is the CEO and co-founder of ChefSteps, the cooking technology company behind futuristic kitchen tools like the Joule sous vide circulator that are changing the way people cook. Prior to ChefSteps, Young was the principal co-author with Nathan Myhrvold of the acclaimed six-volume work Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. He was also the founding chef of Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen, the secret culinary laboratory behind the innovative dishes served at one of the best restaurants in the world. Before he became a chef and a technologist, he completed degrees in theoretical mathematics and biochemistry at the University of Washington.

Michael Merzenich is a UCSF professor emeritus whose neuroscience-directed research has focused on resolving the fundamental nature of plasticity in the child and adult brain, then on the development of practical strategies designed to deploy this life-long capacity for brain change for the practical and medical benefit of children and adults with neurological impairments and disease. Nearly 9 million children and adults have benefited from the use of the intensive computer-based training programs created by his research teams at UCSF and at the research companies that he has founded (Scientific Learning; Posit Science).

A primary goal at those companies has been the evolution of strategies for more effectively managing and stabilizing organic brain health, all across the human lifespan. A more specific focus has been directed toward the prevention and treatment of psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases; on the neurological restoration of function in patients with physical and hemorrhagic brain injury, and by poisons and infections; and on improving the cognitive performance abilities in children and adults struggling with many brain-associated developmental and acquired disorders.