AIMS: Why me?

AIMS was started in 2003 when Neil Turok's family donated a hotel in Muizenberg, a coastal sub-urb of Cape Town, South Africa. I heard of the school from Neil's TED talk.


One day I got an e-mail at work, sent to everyone in my faculty, stating that if we wanted to teach at AIMS, we could fill out an online form. I did that, but thought it would just disappear into the ether and I'd never hear about it again. But I got an e-mail a few months later asking if I'd consider making the trip to teach the course I had named "Modeling Neural Systems". I was ecstatic! I've never taught that kind of course, though. Neuroscience, I mean. So I've spent time over the last year patching up holes in my knowledge, preparing to teach the basics of computational neuroscience. You know what they say, "If you want to learn something really well, teach it."