William Dorrell

About

William Dorrell is an incoming research fellow at the Kempner Institute at Harvard University.

Research Focus

William Dorrell tries to understand how biological neurons implement cognitive computations. His approach to this involves asking why neurons fire the way they do, and building mathematical theories to try and understand this. These mathematical theories are usually optimization problems, leading to hypotheses like: “if the neurons were trying to perform this computation optimally then, under some constraints, they should behave like this.” Dorrell compares the predictions of these theories to neural recordings from brains or artificial neural networks. He hopes these approaches will help in understanding the algorithms the brain uses to do clever things like play board games, tap rhythms, or reason.