Emulating the brain, starting with C. elegans.

I am a fourth-year joint doctoral student in the Harvard–MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program and a trainee in the Neuroimaging Training Program. I am a MathWorks Fellow at MIT School of Engineering and a K. Lisa Yang fellow at the Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center. I am fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Ed Boyden and Prof. Gabriel Kreiman. As a PhD minor, I am also part of the Humanitarian Studies Concentration at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Most of my time is spent developing various technologies toward whole brain emulation (WBE). My research is multi-disciplinary, spanning chemistry, physics, neuroscience and computation. I choose to focus on C. elegans because it is an important and tractable first step and can serve as a groundtruth to evaluate the right approach for scaling up to mammalian and human WBE in the future.

Previously, I received a B.S. in chemistry, a B.A. in genetics and genomics, and a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, where I worked with Prof. Dan Portnoy on the biochemical mechanisms of oxygen-dependent intracellular replication in anaerobic pathogens as a BSP Research Fellow supported by the Hellman Foundation. I then received an S.M. in computational biology from Harvard University, working with Prof. Rameen Beroukhim as a Point Foundation Scholar and a Sinclair Kennedy Fellow.