Community Spotlight: The Many Roles of Kempner Associate Faculty
Associate faculty member Talia Konkle (left) says that collaborating with Kempner research fellows has enriched the culture of her research lab.
Photo: Anna Olivella
From driving innovative research and creating new collaborative teams to mentoring students and serving on selection committees, Kempner associate faculty members are experts at wearing many hats at once. It is precisely the depth and breadth of their engagement that makes their role so central to the life and advancement of the institute, and offers unique and varied opportunities for their own intellectual and professional growth.
For many associate faculty members, the Kempner is both an intellectual and a physical hub for connection and collaboration. “I’ve found the intellectual community to be the most rewarding aspect of my role at Kempner,” says Samuel Gershman, Kempner associate faculty member and a professor in the Department of Psychology. “Every Wednesday I spend the afternoon chatting informally with students, postdocs, and faculty on topics ranging from neurophysiology and linguistics to computer vision and reinforcement learning.”
The opportunity for creative, interdisciplinary collaboration with faculty and students has tangible implications for researchers across the University doing cutting-edge work in AI. “The depth of expertise [within the Kempner] in machine learning foundations and multimodal, generative, and agentic AI combined with applications in biology has led to truly interdisciplinary scientific discovery,” explains Marinka Zitnik, a Kempner associate faculty member and an associate professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School.
Photo credit: Anthony Tulliani
For some associate faculty members, the Kempner has played an important role in helping to shape the culture of intellectual inquiry in their labs. “I’ve been really impressed by the research fellows,” says Talia Konkle, Kempner associate faculty member and professor in the Department of Psychology. “They have really enriched the lab culture with great energy and intellectual engagement [and] have brought in new expertise in areas where I would not normally be able to recruit a postdoc without the broader environment of the Kempner to support them. Our lab is a transformed place when they join.”
The associate faculty role also offers an opportunity to connect with prominent researchers and potential collaborators who are based outside of the Kempner says Patrick Slade, a Kempner associate faculty member and an assistant professor of bioengineering at SEAS. “As an associate faculty, I host and meet with speakers for the Kempner Seminar Series, which has been really helpful for me to learn more about both the innovative neuroscience and computer science labs working on advancing natural and artificial intelligence,” he says.
Beyond the development of their own ideas and research, associate faculty play a key role in the Kempner’s mission to foster the next generation of intelligence researchers. Associate faculty take on varied roles in this regard, everything from serving on the selection committee for research fellows to mentoring post-bac students one-on-one.
Slade, for example, mentors Harvard undergraduate students through the institute’s KURE and KRANIUM programs. “Participating on the KRANIUM committee has been a lot of fun,” says Slade. “It is incredible to see how many talented students are excited about advancing natural and artificial intelligence.”
“Mentorship is my favorite part of being a faculty, and this program is an exciting example of enabling passionate students to learn and dive into research,” he says. “I’m sure it will play a big role in training the next generation of scientists.”
Photo credit: Anna Olivella
Demba Ba, Kempner associate faculty member and Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS, agrees. “Working with our undergrads and propping them up, early, to become members of communities like ours, having the platform to be able to do that has been amazing,” he says.
In addition to mentorship and collaboration, Kempner associate faculty members contribute to institutional development in a variety of ways. Zitnik, for example, serves on the computational committee for cluster governance. Her experience on the committee, she said, has allowed her the opportunity to shape the computational ecosystem that supports Kempner’s ambitious research.
“I’ve been particularly impressed by how scientific hypotheses translate into large-scale computational tests and, in turn, drive advances in data and model-efficient AI,” she says. “This process helps optimize large-scale experiments and align infrastructure with research needs in AI.”
Three years into the Kempner’s existence, the associate faculty have emerged as essential to the fabric of the Kempner’s intellectual, programmatic, and human-centered community.
“We are creating an intellectual community with an important research mission, but we are also creating an educational and essentially human community, where engagement and connection allow for creativity and cross-pollination of thought,” says Kempner Executive Director Elise Porter.
“Each faculty member contributes something unique to the Kempner,” explains Porter. “The associate faculty program was a critical element of establishing the Kempner and has become part of the bedrock of our institute. They are the reason we are able to do what we do here at the Kempner.”
To learn more about applying to be a Kempner associate faculty member, visit the associate faculty page on the Kempner’s website. Applications are currently open through April 1, 2025.
About the Kempner Institute
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. 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 our brains use for fast, flexible natural reasoning, and understanding how our brains compute and reason can be elucidated by theories developed for AI. Join the Kempner mailing list to learn more, and to receive updates and news.
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Deborah Apsel Lang | (617) 495-7993
