Ilya Nemenman

Ilya Nemenman received his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 2000 for his work on problems connecting theoretical physics, information theory, and neuroscience. He was a postdoctoral scientist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and then at the Joint Centers for Systems Biology at Columbia University School of Medicine. He was then a staff member at the Computer and Computational Sciences Division and the Center for Nonlinear Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Currently he is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Physics and Biology and the co-Director of the Initiative in Theory and Modeling of Living Systems at Emory University.

He served as a Chair of the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society (APS), is now in the leadership of the American Association for the Advancement of Science physics section, is a co-founder of The q-bio Conference and Summer School, and has been co-organizing the Theoretical Biophysics Summer School in the U.S. and France over the last decade. He is an APS Fellow, Simons Investigator, and James S. McDonnell Complex Systems Scholar. His research focuses on how biological systems process sensory information, learn from it, and act on it. He additionally develops methods for automatic inference of mathematical models underlying complex, multiscale, biological processes from high-dimensional experimental data.