“Wildly associative”

Hello friends! Who am I and what do I have to say?

I’m a recent PhD graduate from Harvard; my degree says Biophysics but my thesis was some combination of computational neuroscience and machine learning, covered in Harvard Magazine (“Computational Control of a Living Brain?”) and Scientific American (“Scientists Make ‘Cyborg Worms’ with a Brain Guided by AI”). Now I do other neuroscience research.

May 2025, commencement ceremony. Photo credit: Jeffrey Aceves, whose family members had really good seats

Anton Ego in the 2007 Pixar movie Ratatouille said, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” I’m pretty sure the same applies to thoughts and ideas, so this is a place for me to make tenuous connections that would never escape Reviewer #2.

I’ll write about old papers, TV shows, things I hear while walking around in parks, all related in the end to the brain, probably.

The late great neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks wrote, referring to his best friend at Oxford, a mathematician: “He was attracted by my sometimes wildly associative mind, as I was by his highly focused mind.”

Sacks, Oliver. On the Move: A Life (p. 18). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.