John Pearson

What makes us intelligent? How do the hundred billion cells in our brain give rise to speech, music, and athletic performance, and how does this process break down in disease? Just as fixing a computer requires a mental model of how its parts work together, treating brain disorders will require understanding the fundamental principles by which the brain develops, learns, and maintains its function over time. 

Our lab works to identify these fundamental principles. In close collaboration with experimentalists, we devise new methods for distilling scientific hypotheses from large and complex data sets, and we build AI-driven systems that adapt experiments to incoming data in real time. Our ultimate goal is to produce theories that allow both scientists and clinicians to reason about brain function, understand existing data, and devise new treatments.