James DiCarlo

Jim DiCarlo joined the McGovern Institute in 2002, and is currently the Peter de Florez Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences as well as Director of the MIT Quest for Intelligence. For nearly nine years, DiCarlo was also the head of MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. He received his MD and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1998 and did his postdoctoral work at Baylor College of Medicine from 1998 to 2002. He is a past recipient of a Sloan fellowship, a Pew Scholar Award, and a McKnight Scholar Award.

DiCarlo’s research goal is to reverse engineer the brain mechanisms that underlie human visual intelligence. He and his collaborators have revealed how population image transformations carried out by a deep stack of interconnected neocortical brain areas—called the primate ventral visual stream—are effortlessly able to extract object identity from visual images. His team uses a combination of large-scale neurophysiology, brain imaging, direct neural perturbation methods, and machine learning methods to build and test neurally-mechanistic computational models of the ventral visual stream and its support of cognition and behavior. Such an engineering-based understanding is likely to lead to new artificial vision and artificial intelligence approaches, new brain-machine interfaces to restore or augment lost senses, and a new foundation to ameliorate disorders of the mind.