Surya Ganguli
2023 Polymaths Award Winner
Dr. Surya Ganguli is an Associate Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford where he leads the Neural Dynamics and Computation Lab and has been a visiting researcher at both Google and Meta AI. He triple-majored in physics, mathematics, and EECS at MIT, completed a PhD in string theory at University of California Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral researcher in theoretical neuroscience at University of California San Francisco. 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. Visit the Neural Dynamics and Computation Lab website for more information on their work.
Planned Polymaths Work: Dr. Ganguli will pursue an interdisciplinary research program to understand how many nonlinear elements interact to yield remarkable emergent computational capabilities, whether these elements are biological neurons in living brains, artificial neurons in successful AI systems, or quantum mechanical systems of atoms and photons that behave like neural circuits in the classical limit.