I am a Scientist and a Shanahan Fellow at the Allen Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle.

I work primarily with Dr. Stefan Mihalas at the Allen Institute. I am also mentored by Dr. Christof Koch and Prof. Adrienne Fairhall.

I completed my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. My thesis advisor was Prof. Pulkit Grover.

My research

I work at the intersection of information theory, computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence. My research focuses on developing information-theoretic abstractions and metrics to help us understand biological and artificial neural circuits. I believe that true understanding emerges only when we can predict how these systems will behave in unexpected situations, and engineer them to prevent undesirable outcomes. I like to collaborate with theorists and practitioners to identify fundamental theoretical problems, and address these using formal mathematical and computational models.

During my Ph.D., I developed a new framework to measure the information flow of specific messages in the brain. I showed how such a framework could be adapted to artificial neural networks, to track the flows of accuracy and bias, and selectively remove bias. I also studied the fundamental limits of high-density Electroencephalography (EEG), showing the theoretical benefits of higher densities, and informing the design of new neural interfaces.

As a Shanahan Fellow, I have developed estimators for measures of unique, redundant and synergistic information (collectively known as partial information decomposition measures). My work has enabled the application of these measures to high-dimensional neuroscientific data, and hypothesized a potential information gating mechanism in visual cortex. More recently, I have been developing and validating a theory of how trial-to-trial variability might serve a useful computational role in visual cortex, by helping us generalize from a small number of examples.

Please see my research page for more, or jump directly to my list of publications.

Contact me

The best way to get in touch with me is email:

 first_name DOT last_name AT alleninstitute DOT org