Venkatesh Murthy, an Indian American expert in olfactory neuroscience is joining the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard as associate faculty from July 1.
Their pioneering research advances the Kempner Institute’s core scientific mission to understand the basis of natural and artificial intelligence, according to a news release from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institute
Murthy, who is Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Paul J. Finnegan Family Director of the Center for Brain Science, studies the neural circuits and associated algorithms that enable animals to navigate the olfactory world.
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“I hope that our group’s work on chemical sensing and odor-guided animal behavior — which I have come to call Intelligent Olfaction— can bring a fresh angle to the study of intelligence that can complement existing strengths at the Kempner Institute,” said Murthy.
“I am particularly excited to interact with the independent fellows and graduate students to learn from them, and to perchance interest them in challenging out-of-the-mainstream, side-road problems.”
Gil, who is assistant professor of computer science at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), researches cooperation in robot-robot and human-robot teams.
Murthy and Gil will join the Kempner’s ten current associate faculty members. Kempner Institute associate faculty play a key role in the institute, working closely with fellow community members to foster collaborative research efforts, pursue new discoveries, design impactful educational programs, and direct the institute’s scientific growth.
Born in a small industrial town of Neyveli in south India, Murthy came to the United States after getting a BTech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
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An MSE in Bioengineering from the University of Washington, Seattle led to his interest in neuroscience, according to his profile. A PhD in Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Washington followed, and postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, solidified his path in neuroscience research. He joined Harvard University as an Assistant Professor in 1999.
The Kempner Institute seeks to understand the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems by recruiting and training future generations of researchers to study intelligence from biological, cognitive, engineering, and computational perspectives, according to the release.
Its bold premise is that the fields of natural and artificial intelligence are intimately interconnected; the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) will require the same principles that human brains use for fast, flexible natural reasoning, and understanding how human brains compute and reason can be elucidated by theories developed for AI.