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Rajesh P. N. Rao

Rajesh P. N. Rao is the Director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester and was a Sloan postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Faculty Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He is the author of the textbook Brain-Computer Interfacing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of two volumes, Probabilistic Models of the Brain (MIT Press, 2002) and Bayesian Brain (MIT Press, 2007). His research spans the areas of computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and brain-computer interfacing. His publications in these areas can be accessed here.

In his not-so-copious spare time, Dr. Rao also works on the 4000-year-old Indus script (you can watch his TED talk on the topic here) and indulges in his passion for Indian miniature paintings.

Adrienne Fairhall

Adrienne Fairhall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. degree in statistical physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1998 and began her work in computational neuroscience in the research group of William Bialek.

Dr. Fairhall is the co-Director of the University of Washington Institute for Neuroengineering and the Computational Neuroscience Program, and has also directed the prestigious Methods in Computational Neuroscience course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Dr Fairhall's research aims to discover the mathematical and physical principles that govern information coding and transmission in the nervous system.