Talmo Pereira

Talmo is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Center for AI and Research Computing at the Salk Institute. His lab develops and applies computational tools for neuroscience and biology. He started the lab as a Salk Fellow in November 2021, a faculty-level appointment giving advanced PhD students early independence via startup funds, lab space, and hiring ability, bypassing traditional postdoctoral training. Before Salk, he was a research intern in Perception at Google AI, working on pose-based action recognition. He holds a Ph.D. (2021) and M.S. (2017) in Neuroscience from Princeton, where he received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and Princeton’s Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship (2019). His work has made foundational contributions to computational ethology by pioneering deep learning and computer vision methods for quantifying animal behavior, earning the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. It’s been published in Nature Methods and Nature Neuroscience. A defining product is SLEAP, a popular open-source tool for multi-animal pose tracking, which along with its predecessor LEAP has garnered over 1,900 citations, 150,000 downloads, and 45,000 users across 90 countries. His lab continues advancing these methods across software engineering, computer science, probabilistic modeling, and new domains including humanities, plant biology, cancer biology, and neurodegenerative disease. Their research is supported by NIH, NSF, NASA, and private funders, totaling over $10 million in awards.