I am a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California San Diego, where I hold the J. Robert Beyster Endowed Chair in Engineering. I am also the Founding Director of the Center for Engineered Natural Intelligence in the Institute for Neural Computation located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. I am also Associate Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind.
I hold several additional academic affiliations at UCSD, including the Neurosciences Graduate Program, the Computational Neurobiology Program, and the Institute for Neural Computation. I previously served as Vice Chair of the Department of Bioengineering and was Co-Director of the Retinal Engineering Center in the Institute of Engineering in Medicine.
My undergraduate work was a double major in human physiology and biophysics with a minor in philosophy at the University of Toronto. I then did a Masters in neurophysiology and neurobiology, also at the University of Toronto. My doctorate was in bioengineering, theoretical and computational neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in neurology and nanotechnology at Northwestern University. I joined the faculty at the University of California San Diego in 2003 and have been there ever since.
