Dear colleagues and friends of CBS,
I write with great delight to announce that Haim Sompolinsky has decided to stay at Harvard full time, as a Professor in Residence jointly in Physics and MCB and a key member of CBS. We are grateful for his presence here, doing research and teaching, which catalyzes interactions between a vibrant community in theoretical and computational neuroscience and colleagues studying intelligence in natural and artificial systems–the CBS NeuroTheory Initiative.
You may know that Haim has laid theoretical foundations for neuroscience, providing an understanding of memory in Hopfield networks, ring attractor models, and the balanced state of excitation and inhibition in neural networks. Currently, he and his students and postdocs are studying how higher cognitive functions can be achieved by neural networks. To an increasing degree, understanding what neural circuits do and how they do it means using mathematical tools to build interpretable models and relate them to experiments. The importance of this type of work continues to grow, and having Haim here helps keep us at the forefront of the field.
Please join me in welcoming Haim’s full-time presence here at Harvard and CBS!
– Venki (on behalf of CBS)