UCL NeuroAI Talk Series | Dr Athena Akrami

Dr Athena Akrami

at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL

Athena grew up in Iran and obtained her BA in Biomedical Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic (Amirkabir University of Technology) in Tehran, Iran. She pursued her PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, with Alessandro Treves. She continued at SISSA as a postdoctoral fellow, but she switched gears towards experimental neuroscience working with Mathew Diamond. She then moved to the US to pursue another postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University where she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow in the lab of Carlos Brody, focusing on parametric working memory in rodents. Athena joined the faculty at Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) at University College London in UK in November 2018. Her Learning, Inference & Memory laboratory at SWC focuses on understanding the fundamental principles of statistical learning – the ability of the brain to discover and exploit relevant regularities and structures in the world in an unsupervised and implicit manner. In all her research programs, experiments are intertwined with hypotheses drawn from theoretical investigations and computational modeling.