Gianluca Bencomo

I spent the past four years at Princeton (on-leave from PhD) studying foundational topics in machine learning and neuroscience. I funded my research by writing two successful NSF grants to build biologically-inspired vision models based on the fruit fly connectome where the general research direction for myself and certainly my collaborators was the question of “how do we make this fruit fly live inside a computer simulation?” Prior to Princeton, I spent two years at Harvard Medical School studying visual decision-making in primate models and publishing influential theoretical work on dopamine’s role in schizophrenia and its effects on visual perception . I did my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and got to do some cool non-vision work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, figuring out a new way of converting CO2 into O2 on Mars that recycled water and did not require heat (e.g. MOXIE). Generally, I like to work on really hard problems.