Monday, October 17, 2022 at 4:15 p.m.
Location: Physics North Lecture Hall #1
Speaker: Surya Ganguli, Stanford University
Abstract: Remarkable advances in experimental neuroscience now enable us to simultaneously observe and perturb the activity of many neurons, thereby providing an unprecedented opportunity to understand how the moment by moment collective dynamics of the brain instantiates cognition. We will review some of our recent work in this area focusing on examples in which statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and pattern formation theory elucidate fundamental principles governing relations between cognition and neural dynamics, ranging from fundamental limits on perception to neural circuits underlying navigation.
Bio: Surya Ganguli triple majored in physics, mathematics, and EECS at MIT, completed a PhD in string theory at Berkeley, and a postdoc in theoretical neuroscience at UCSF. He is now an associate professor of Applied physics at Stanford where he leads the Neural Dynamics and Computation Lab and is a Research Scientist at Meta AI. His research spans the fields of neuroscience, machine learning and physics, focusing on understanding and improving how both biological and artificial neural networks learn striking emergent computations. He has been awarded a Swartz-Fellowship in computational neuroscience, a Burroughs-Wellcome Career Award, a Terman Award, a NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award, a Sloan fellowship, a James S. McDonnell Foundation scholar award in human cognition, a McKnight Scholar award in Neuroscience, a Simons Investigator Award in the mathematical modeling of living systems, and an NSF career award.
Research Area: Biophysics