Demba Ba

Kempner Institute Associate Faculty
Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering

KEMPNER GLOBAL COMMUNITY I speak: Wolof, Fulani, French, Spanish, English, Arabic

Contact Information

Best way to contact me: Phone

Subjects I Teach:

  • ES 157 (Biological Signal Processing)
  • ES 201/AM 231 (Decision Theory)

Areas I Research:

About

Demba Ba earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, then pursued a master’s degree and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He joined SEAS in 2015, and was named Director of Undergraduate Studies in Bioengineering in 2020. He is a 2016 Fellow in Neuroscience of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and a 2021 recipient of the Roslyn Abramson Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Research Focus

Ba’s current research focuses on computational neuroscience, model-based deep learning, and signal processing. His recent research has examined the connection between sparse, structured signal representations and artificial neural networks. He leverages this connection to develop self-interpretable artificial intelligence and to elucidate the principles of computation in the brain.