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From: "jeffrey E." <jeevacationggmail.com>
To: >
Subject: Fwd: Dear Mr. Epstein
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 01:44:11 +0000
Forwarded message
From: VelaSusan Park
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2014
Subject: Dear Mr. Epstein
To: jeevacation(i)gmail.com, jeffrey_gjeffreyepstein.org
Dear Mr. Epstein,
I hope this letter finds you well. My name is VelaSusan Park, and I'm the Vice President and
the new host of NEURO.tv for Season 2.
I am writing to report on the progress of NEURO.tv for this past year, which we owe in large
part to your donation and the participation of the 174 backers of our Kickstarter campaign last
November. We have ambitious plans to expand NEURO.tv into an uncharted territory. JF is
telling me that he is finalizing our trailers and will send you a separate email in a couple of
days, containing also links to our currently published episodes.
To give a little bit of background about myself, I am a student entrepreneur who has founded
my own software start-up that utilizes artificial intelligence to analyze economic markets. I am
currently pursuing my JD and Masters in Entrepreneurship at Duke Law School. I graduated
with honors and distinction in major in Political Science at Yale University in 2013, and I
worked at a patent law firm in Santa Monica for a year after that. My senior thesis was on the
impact of media and technology on North Korean human rights, in which I interviewed Eric
Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, along with many distinguished scholars at several
top universities in the U.S.
My start-up, OpTix Group, was funded by the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI), and my team
was one of twelve teams that won the 2012 YEI Summer Fellowship. I am an expert in artificial
intelligence, and I have worked with many computer science PhDs at Yale University to
develop patent-pending software for my start-up. I am also a published author, an
accomplished dancer, and a polyglot who can read, write, and speak seven languages. I
believe that my experience in artificial intelligence as well as my passion for the academia will
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make me the perfect person to break down the difficult language of neuroscience to a wider
audience, and take NEURO.tv to the next level.
Here are NEURO.tv updates for the past year:
Guests
NEURO.tv has received guests who are nothing less than the top active neuroscientists and
philosophers alive, and two of our previous guests, May-Britt and Edvard Moser, were
awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine. All of our guests have enjoyed having the
opportunity to explain their research to a large audience. Most of these scientists were not
used to relations with the media and for many of them, it was their first experience in
communicating directly to a crowd of non-specialists. By bringing them to the Internet, we have
created an environment where they can feel safe in talking to the public in an open and
accessible forum. Our guests include:
Edvard and May-Britt Moser, Professors and Directors of the Kavli Institute for Systems
Neuroscience, NTNU
Nicholas C. Spitzer, Distinguished Professor, Biological Sciences, UCSD
Erin C. Mckiernan, Postdoctoral Researcher in Public Health at the National Institute of Public
Health of Mexico
Nita A. Farahany, Professor of Law and Philosophy, Duke University
Hank Greely, Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences and Professor of Genetics,
Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford University
Jeffrey D. Schall, E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Center for
Integrative Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience and the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center,
Vanderbilt University
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Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor of Neurosciences, UCSB
Katherine L. Bryant, Ph. D. student at Emory University
Antonello Bonci, Scientific Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH
Dale Purves, Geller Professor of Neurobiology at Duke and author of the authoritative book
"Neuroscience"
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics, Duke
Gordon Arbuthnott, Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
Joshua D. Greene, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard and author of the book
"Moral Tribes"
Kay Tye, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, MIT
Nita Farahany, Professor of Law and Philosophy, Duke
Michael L. Platt, Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke
Marguerite Matthews, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oregon Health & Science University
Micah Allen, Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Fellow, University College London
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Felipe de Brigard, Assistant Professor at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke
David L. Barrack, Postdoctoral researcher and Ph. D. in Philosophy and Neuroscience, Duke
Hermina Nedelescu and Mohamed Abdelhack, JSPS research fellow and graduate student,
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
Public support
Many of the most respected modern scientists and psychologists have publicly acclaimed
NEURO.tv's contribution to public education, including most of our guests as well as:
David A. Pizarro, Associate Professor, Cornell University
Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor, Harvard
Matthew Rushworth, Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Sebastian Seung, Professor of Computational Neuroscience, MIT
Xuelai Fan, Graduate student, University of British Columbia
Kate Fehlhaber, Graduate student, UCLA
Adam J. Calhoun, Postdoctoral researcher, UCSD
Steve Chang, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Yale
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James McNamara, Duke School of Medicine Professor of Neuroscience, Duke
Edward H. Koo, Professor at the School of Medicine, UCSD
Ann M. Graybiel, Professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Karine Fenelon, Assistant Professor, University of Texas El Paso
Claire O'Connell, MITx fellow and Education Director of EyeWire
Allan Basbaum, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anatomy, UCSF
Media coverage
Our initiative has brought a lot of media attention, including coverage by academic blogs and
newspapers such as the Richard Dawkins Foundation blog, The Duke Chronicle, Philosophy
of Brains, Knowing Neurons, the On Your Mind Podcast, the Very Bad Wizards podcast, the
NeuroEcology blog, the NTNU Medecine Blog, Neuroexia and The London School of
Economics and Political Science Blog. We have also written an article in the peer-reviewed
literature about the NEURO.tv experience, which was published at MJMS.
Importantly, our main publishing outlet, the BrainFacts.org blog, supported by the Kavli
Foundation, the Gatsby Foundation and the Society for Neuroscience is extremely pleased
with the product and the main academic editor of the website, Nicholas Spitzer, has assured
me that he is looking forward to continue publishing our episodes. He was extremely grateful
and happy to learn that we had secured funding from your foundation given the small budget
on which BrainFacts.org is operating. Your foundation as well as our Kickstarter backers are
thanked in every credits section of our show, as well as in the introduction of Episode 6.
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Volunteers
NEURO.tv's work relies on a team of highly-devoted volunteers that include:
Me, VelaSusan Park, JD/LLM in Entrepreneurship student at Duke Law School
Jean-Francois Gariepy, Postdoctoral researcher at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke
Diana L. Xie, Ph. D. student, Duke
Leanne Boucher, Associate Professor, Nova Southeastern University
John L. Kubie, Associate Professor at the Department of Cell Biology, SUNY Downstate
Medical Center
Steven L. Miller, Graduate student, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
Publishing of the episodes and audience
A total of 13 episodes are published and the remaining 6 episodes of Season 1 will be
progressively released up to January. The building of our viewership is going well, but we
intend to make it better for Season 2. NEURO.tv will undergo major changes in terms of
format, making it a more visually appealing and professional show, while maintaining the
quality of the intellectual discussions to the current level. NEURO.tv episodes typically gather
a thousand viewers on the month of their publications, and reach up to 6000 viewers after 6
months. Importantly, the quality and timelessness of the discussions give even the oldest
NEURO.tv episodes a very good potential for long tail viewing. Twitter and Reddit measures of
success are extremely good, and the episodes bring a good level of commenting on social
networks. On YouTube, the average looking time for an episode is about 15 minutes per
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session of viewing, which is very high considering that the YouTube audience is typically less
attentive for long periods of time. Half of our viewership is directly downloading the files on our
website or on iTunes, and we have no way to tell the viewing time for this part of our audience
but we receive most of our email comments from them and we know that many of them are
listening to the entire episodes.
Hosts
NEURO.tv's goal is not only to revolutionize the way science is communicated to scientists as
well as the general public. We also want to train young scientists to speak of science publicly.
As you know, our host for Season 1 was Diana L. Xie, a student who had just finished her
undergraduate studies in Pharmacology and was looking to gather new experiences in science
and science communication before deciding her future. By welcoming her to NEURO.tv, we
have provided her with an environment where she was exposed to the top neuroscientists of
our time and where she had to learn how to communicate concepts in neuroscience and
philosophy to the general public. Since then, she has been accepted in two of the best
neuroscience schools in the country, Yale and Duke, and she will be pursuing a Ph. D. in
Neuroscience at Duke where she will study the boundaries between artificial and human
intelligence and how people differentiate between classes of agents ranging from simple
reactive computer agents to more complex computer players and humans. She intends to
publish a book in the next years on artificial intelligence, cognition and neuroscience. These
results show that NEURO.tv can be used as a springboard for young scientists who can then
apply what they have learned to pursue their Ph. D. studies. Importantly, it shows that the
NEURO.tv model is a viable solution for emerging scientists to gain experience and interest in
the broad intellectual questions that are covered on our show.
Administration
We have now obtained the 501(c)(3) status from the IRS, and are up-to-date in our tax
reporting and accounting of expenses.
Conclusion
As JF pointed out in a recent article at BrainFacts.org which went quite popular (Scientists on
Twitterhttp://blog.brainfacts.org/2014/07/scientists-on-twitter0 the way we do science and
communicate it is changing. There is no reason why the best ideas would not have their place
on the Internet, to be viewed by anyone in the places where people go for information and
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entertainment, like YouTube. I believe that academia is currently changing and will keep
changing during the next decades and that, when we look back, initiatives like NEURO.tv will
be viewed as some of the early steps in freeing the information flow between scientists and the
general public. Almost every single guest on NEURO.tv could be the keynote speaker of an
international scientific symposium where a hundred persons would gather to discuss upcoming
directions of research. NEURO.tv accomplishes even more, by making the discussion public,
freely available for anyone to listen to, and we do so at a fraction of the cost that a scientific
symposium would represent. Importantly, we change the format of scientific presentation by
making it an appealing, open discussion about issues in current neuroscience research, which
leads to more honest exchanges about the limits of current research and leaves place for
scientists to express their fascination about the questions that relate to how the brain works
and how it generates our behaviors.
We are grateful for your initial contribution to this project, which I believe is revolutionizing how
academics exchange knowledge and determine the future directions of their research. I speak
for the whole NEURO.tv team in thanking you for being part of a project that is bigger than
each of us.
Best regards,
VelaSusan Park
Vice President of NERUO.tv
JD/LLM in Entrepreneurship '17 Duke Law School
B.A. Political Science '13 Yale University
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