Keynote Lecture: Ila Fiete

A first-draft theory of high-performance human hippocampal episodic and spatial memory, unified

Ila Fiete, MIT
Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and McGovern Institute

Ila Fiete's group seeks to understand how the architecture and dynamics of neural circuits enable memory, integration, and flexible cognition. They are interested in how structures emerge over brain development, how the brain learns, holds memories, integrates, and performs cognitive inference and reasoning. They use analytical and computational tools, and their approach includes working closely with collaborators on specific experimental systems.

Ila Fiete obtained her Ph.D. in Physics and Neuroscience at Harvard. Her postdoctoral work was at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara, and at Caltech, where she was a Broad Fellow. She subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in the Center for Learning and Memory, and then moved her lab to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where she is Director of the Integrative Cognitive Neuroscience (ICoN) Center. Ila Fiete has been an HHMI Faculty Scholar, a CIFAR Senior Fellow, a McKnight Scholar, an ONR Young Investigator, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Searle Scholar. She received the Swartz Prize for Theoretical Neuroscience in 2022.