Growing up in Academia

Official CV

​I'm a senior Reinforcement Learning researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. Every Friday (4 PM ET) I cohost The Learning Salon(with Joshua Vogelstein and John Krakauer). If you prefer podcasts,BrainInspired& Parsing Science have kindly featured my work.

BrainInspired also featured podcasts of our panels on Deep RL and Dopamine & Advancing Neuro Deep learning.

I study how we build models of the world and use them in memory, exploration, & planning. I build and test neurally plausible algorithms for learning the structure of the environment. My approach combines reinforcement learning, neural networks, & machine learning with behavioral experiments, fMRI, & electrophysiology.​

My training is in cognitive computational neuroscience (via computer science and philosophy). I've previously worked at Columbia University, Electrophysiology, Memory, and Navigation Lab, did my postdoc at Princeton (where I collaborated with Ken Norman, Matt Botvinick, Jon Cohen, Nathaniel Daw), my PhD was in psychology (Berlin, Germany, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience), BSc in software engineering (Tehran, Iran), & MSc in Philosophy of Science (Utrecht, Netherlands).