Meet the Faculty: Grace W. Lindsay
This entree is a part of our Meet the Faculty blog series, which introduces and highlights faculty who have recently joined CDS.
Meet CDS Faculty Grace W. Lindsay, who joined CDS this fall as an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science. Grace is currently a Research Fellow for the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre/Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London on building functional and interpretable models of sensory processing.
Grace graduated with her PhD from the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, working in Ken Miller’s lab, and receiving a Google PhD Fellowship in Computational Neuroscience to support her studies. She continued on at Columbia as a Postdoctoral Scientist at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. Before her graduate work, Grace earned a BS in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh, working with Brent Doiron and Tai Sing Lee, and spent a year at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Freiburg, Germany.
In 2018, Grace signed a contract with Bloomsbury Sigma to write a book about her research area. “Models of the Mind: How physics, engineering, and mathematics have shaped our understanding of the brain” explores how mathematics and computational neuroscience have informed what we know about how the brain works. “These chapters document the history of how mathematics has woven its way into biology and the exciting advances this collaboration has in store,” said Grace on her website.
In addition to her book, Grace’s writing expertise has led her to produce podcasts such as Unsupervised Thinking on neuroscience and AI, freelance for the Simons Foundation and other scientific publications, and join the neuroscience-journalist collaborative Neuwrite. She has also served as Chair of Communications and Outreach at Neuromatch Academy in 2020, an online computational neuroscience summer school, and was a Harvard BHI Essay Competition winner in 2018.
Grace’s published research has recently included “Deep Learning Networks and Visual Perception” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Psychology (2021), “Attention in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Machine Learning” in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (2020), and “Convolutional Neural Networks as a Model of the Visual System: Past, Present, and Future” in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2020).
“As CDS joint faculty, I’m hoping to explore methods that help us understand intelligent systems, both artificial and biological,” said Grace. “I’m also excited to expand my work in applied data science, particularly for fighting climate change.”
To view all our current faculty, please visit the CDS Joint Faculty page on our website.
By Meryl Phair
