I am a postdoctoral fellow in Florian Engert’s group at Harvard MCB, researching innateness in neurodevelopment and AI. I received my PhD from the Harvard Biophysics Graduate Program in 2023. In summer 2021, I was a NeuroAI Scholar at CSHL with Tony Zador and Alex Koulakov.

I am passionate about how theory can accelerate neurodevelopment research, and how neurodev and neuroevolution can inform machine learning and neuroscience models. I have organized three workshops on the topic, at Cosyne 2023, at an internal event at Harvard in May 2023, and at the Bernstein Computational Neuroscience Conference.

In 2023, Balázs Csizik and I exhibited Biophilia in which we reflected on the paralleles between biological and urban growth.

I received my B.S. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame, where I worked with Zoltán Toroczkai on distance-based network models of brain connectivity (2013-2017).

Previously,

• I worked on a Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award at the National Institute of Mental Health (2017-2018).
• As a Janelia Undergraduate Scholar, I modeled fly behavior using Reinforcement Learning with Ann Hermundstad and Vivek Jayaraman (2017).
• I participated in the Undergraduate Research Program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, optimizing a calcium imaging analysis pipeline with Anne Churchland and Matt Kaufman (2016).
• At MIT, I prototyped methods for reconstructing neurons from Expansion Microscopy with Adam Marblestone and Ed Boyden (2015).
• Even earlier, I assisted with Yeast-Two Hybrid assays of protein-protein interactions with Nidhi Sahni in Marc Vidal's Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (2012), and developed face recognition software for social interaction research with Manuel Cebrian in Sandy Pentland's Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab (2010).

Page me at barabasi(a)fas(d)harvard(d)edu.