How do organisms learn autonomously through observing and interacting with the world? More specifically, how do brains enable this learning and the resultant cognitive and behavioral capacities of humans and other organisms? How do the architectural constraints of our brains shape learning and emergent neural representations? What can we learn from the data we collect in cognitive science and neuroscience? How can artificial intelligence inform our understanding of biological intelligence, and vice-versa?
As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Harvard Vision Lab, these are some of the questions I am fortunate to work on, along with my advisors Talia Konkle and George Alvarez, and brilliant colleagues in and out of the lab. Generally, I pull heavily from the tools and knowledge of modern AI to make theoretical advances in neuroscience.
I received my Ph.D in Neural Computation from Carnegie Mellon University in December 2023, where I was advised by David Plaut and Marlene Behrmann. My Ph.D work involved the development of computational models of familiar and unfamiliar face recognition, and of cortical organization for visual domains. The latter work introduced a class of computational models of visual cortical topography, referred to as Interactive Topographic Networks. The code to simulate these models and further develop them is publicly available on GitHub. Much of my research continues to build upon this class of models, for example extending it to account for the influence of retinotopy and language on the global organization of human ventral temporal cortex, including mediolateral and hemispheric organization (see poster from OHBM 2022), and in modeling the organization of language through topographic language models (stay tuned!). I see this work as a set of critical first steps towards the development of large-scale functional models of the human cortex.
I am always eager to discuss science and technology, and am happy to answer any questions you have about my work or discuss possible routes for collaboration. Feel free to get in touch through email or social media using the links to the left.
Some pretty but uninformative pictures of me