Surya Ganguli

Ganguli headshot photo

Associate Professor of Applied Physics, and by courtesy, of Neurobiology, of Electrical Engineering, and of Computer Science, Stanford University; Faculty Associate Director, Stanford HAI

Surya Ganguli triple majored in physics, mathematics, and EECS at MIT, completed a PhD in string theory at Berkeley, and a postdoc in theoretical neuroscience at UCSF. He is now an associate professor of Applied physics at Stanford where he leads the Neural Dynamics and Computation Lab. He has also been a visiting researcher at both Google and Meta AI and is currently a Venture Partner at a16z. His research spans the fields of neuroscience, machine learning and physics, focusing on understanding and improving how both biological and artificial neural networks learn striking emergent computations. He has been awarded a Swartz-Fellowship in computational neuroscience, a Burroughs-Wellcome Career Award, a Terman Award, two NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Awards, a Sloan fellowship, a James S. McDonnell Foundation scholar award in human cognition, a McKnight Scholar award in Neuroscience, a Simons Investigator Award in the mathematical modeling of living systems, an NSF career award, and a Schmidt Science Polymath Award.