George Cai
Kempner Graduate Fellow
Ph.D. student in Neuroscience
About
George Cai wants to understand how biological intelligences can quickly and robustly adapt their behavior in new situations. This includes algorithmic questions of how sequences of experience can be transformed into abstract world models and mechanistic questions about the tension between compositionality and emergence in neural representations. Prior to graduate school, Cai conducted research in applying machine learning methods to biomedical problems including aging, protein function, and antibiotics. He earned an AB in physics from Harvard University in 2024. Outside of research, Cai enjoys playing the card game Set, cooking, running, writing, and reading.
Research Focus
Cai’s current research focuses on the role of randomness in neurobiological phenomena. He seeks to elucidate mechanisms of representational drift in the primary visual cortex through a combination of theory, computational modeling, and experimental data analysis. He is also interested in the way the hippocampal formation encodes space, events, and contextual information, and what role, if any, uninterpretable cell types beyond place, grid, and vector cells can play in navigation.