 My name is Maxwell Wang. I'm an MD-PC student receiving my PhD from Carnegie Mullen, joined between the machine learning department and the neuroscience institute. I am also a medical student with the University of Pittsburgh. I am a Taiwanese American that was born in New York City and raised in Rockford, Illinois. When I was preparing for the three-minute thesis preliminary rounds, I did rehearse the presentation a few times at events to make sure that it fell within three minutes. I always prefer to present with a slow cadence with a clear voice and rehearse the presentation as such. Well, during the actual day of the qualifying rounds, I was somewhat nervous. I am only human after all, so I happened to speak a little quickly. I was approaching the end of my piece, and I took a quick glance at the clock and realized, oh no, I still have a minute left to my time. This is not the two-minute thesis competition. This is the three-minute thesis. So I had to take a breath, think of something really interesting about the work that I could explain in a minute that I had left and how was I going to weave it into the story that I was telling? Well, I suppose that if the judges didn't immediately kick me out of this after I was done, they must have thought that I said something vaguely reasonable, at least. One fun fact about my thesis was some of the data management issues we ran into. We use surgically implanted electrodes in the heads of 20 human patients and recorded from them for a week straight in order to see how their brains changed as they mostly freely went about their day reading books, talking with friends and family, watching YouTube on their phone and such. One challenge of this is that high temporal resolution data being pulled off of over 100 electrodes in someone's head generates terabytes of data each day which quickly overwhelmed our systems. And especially since COVID, our hospital IT department has been incredibly overworked. So I ended up having to purchase a stack of hard drives off of Amazon 3-day sipping and physically carting them around the hospital with these little post-it note labels attached to each one in order to make a lot of this work. It was a fun time, but it does also so that with Moore's law, what is feasible with computation today is completely different to what it was 10 years ago. To those of us working in medicine, this is both our talents and our opportunity. When I think about doing research at Carnegie Mellon, what does this mean to me? It is an opportunity to combine strengths and several fields to make something really interesting happen. CMU is, of course, an incredible place to be studying machine learning and competencies of neuroscience. But also more than that in Pittsburgh, we have hospitals, engineering disciplines, and startups at the top of their respective fields that give us the opportunity to apply our craft in meaningful ways to make a positive impact on the world.