Ila Fiete is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an Associate Member of the McGovern Institute at MIT. She directs the K. Lisa Yang Integrative and Computational Neuroscience Center.
Ila obtained her undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, under the guidance of Sebastian Seung at MIT (co-advised by Daniel Fisher). Her postdoctoral work was at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara, and at Caltech, where she was a Broad Fellow. She was subsequently on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in the Center for Learning and Memory and served as the Inaugural Director of the Center for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience.
Ila Fiete is an HHMI Faculty Scholar. She has been a CIFAR Senior Fellow, a McKnight Scholar, an ONR Young Investigator, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Searle Scholar. In 2022, she received the SfN’s Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience.
Apart from my science, I love spending time with family. I’m passionate about gardening and restoring native vegetation, as well as cooking, travel, hiking, and food history.