Anthony Zador

Anthony M. Zador is the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology and former Chair of Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a co-founder, in 2004, of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference, and of the NAISYS (Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems) meeting about the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Anthony Zador received a B.A. at the UC, Berkeley and MD/PhD from Yale University, working with Christof Koch at Caltech on focusing on machine learning and computational neuroscience. He carried out postdoctoral research in experimental neuroscience at the Salk Institute with Chuck Stevens before assuming a faculty position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1999. Work in the lab is divided into 3 main areas. First, the lab focuses on the neural circuits underlying auditory decisions. Second, the lab develops new technologies for converting the connectome into a form suitable for DNA sequencing. Finally, the lab applies insights from neuroscience to generate better AI algorithms. Animals are born with highly structured brain connectivity, which equips them with the ability to function well soon after birth with little or no experience. Because the wiring diagram is far too complex to be specified explicitly in the genome, it must be compressed through a “genomic bottleneck”. I will discuss theoretical and experimental results regarding the nature of the rules governing the genomic bottleneck and how high-throughput molecular connectomics based on new sequencing technologies can help uncover these rules.