Yutaka Sprague

Kempner Graduate Fellow
Ph.D. Student in Neuroscience

Preferred Pronouns: They/Them
KEMPNER GLOBAL COMMUNITY I speak: English, Japanese

Contact Information

Best way to contact me: Email

Areas I Research:

About

Yutaka Sprague is graduate student in the Program in Neuroscience, a Kempner Graduate Fellow, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Before joining Harvard, they received a B.S. in computer science and B.S. in neuroscience at Duke University, had a brief stint in industry in San Francisco, and worked as a research technician at UCSF. They are interested in questions of neural encoding of sensory systems and how the evolving internal state of the brain impacts the response to sensory stimuli. In addition to their research work, Sprague is also interested in science policy and discussions about the ethical use of AI and NeuroAI technologies.

Research Focus

Sprague’s primary research interests fall at the intersection of computational neuroscience and statistical machine learning. They are especially interested in understanding how the encoding of information in individual neurons is related to the informational capacity and representations of larger networks of neurons. They have previously studied these questions in C. elegans and Zebrafish but are interested in general theories of neural computation that span across species and potentially even to artificial networks.