September's BostonTalks is all about coming together. Listen to three speakers share the way their careers and research focus on the exploration and making of connections. First, Dr. Matt Peterson ([@mfpetersmit](https://twitter.com/mfpetersmit "@mfpetersmit")) of MIT studies how our brains make connections allowing us to know and understand others instantly through facial recognition. Learn about connecting real food to the restaurant table from Chef Chandra Gouldrup, owner of the Farmer's Daughter in Easton, MA. Then, go behind the blue paint with Lyle Blaker ([@BMGBoston](https://twitter.com/bmgboston?lang=en "@BMGBoston")) of Blue Man Group, and hear how he connects with his audience without saying a word.
Matthew Peterson received his PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from the University of California, Santa Barbara under the mentorship of Miguel Eckstein. Their work combined psychophysics, eye tracking, and computational modeling to understand how individuals select and compute information from faces for critical social tasks. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher in Nancy Kanwisher’s lab at MIT. By measuring our real world visual experience, MIT aims to better understand the computations the brain uses to form our beliefs about the world and others to guide our actions during normal everyday behavior.
Chef Chandra’s journey that led her to being one of the area’s most passionate and respected proponents of sustainable, or “farm to table”, cooking all started at home when she was just a child. Chandra, truly being a “[Farmer’s Daughter](https://www.thefarmersdaughtereaston.com/ "Farmer's Daughter")”, had the belief that you eat what you grow ingrained in her at an early age. Chandra then took these experiences and views out of her family’s kitchen in Southern New Hampshire down to Boston and into the professional kitchens of some of New England’s most respected culinary minds. Chandra has begun to set her sights on a number of next phase developments with a continued focus on “Real. Local. Fresh. Food.” Or as Chandra likes to say, “doing it the way we were always meant to.”
Lyle Blaker was born and raised in West Liberty, Ohio. From an early age, Lyle loved to entertain. Being the middle child he learned how to make his siblings and family laugh and entertaining was often a tool to get him out of trouble. His father would often jokingly say, “I only keep you around because you make me laugh!” It wasn’t until the end of high school that the idea of becoming an actor became a viable option, much to his parents delight (he says with total sarcasm.) He attended the country’s oldest acting school in New York City, American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and graduated in 2007 as the recipient of the academy’s “Best Obtained Stage Speech and Dialect” award. After graduation, Lyle performed in and coached various improv groups in New York City and worked as a production assistant for the A&E Network before auditioning to become a [Blue Man](https://www.blueman.com/boston/about-show "Blue Man") in 2010. The Blue Man role appealed to him because it is a mix of everything he loved doing growing up- music, drumming, improve and comedy.