Research Interests

My work in particle physics has focused on basic questions concerning the nature of space and time.  I have worked on the origin of the thermodynamics of gravitating systems and the apparent loss of quantum information in the presence of black holes.  My work has shown ways in which the familiar smooth structure of space-time can emerge as a long-distance effective description of more complex underlying physical constructs.   My work has also explored how the matter and forces whose existence is known from laboratory experiments and astrophysical measurements arise from a fundamental unified theory of forces, matter and spacetime.

My interests in the nature of information, and the ways it is produced, processed and transmitted have led to my present research in neuroscience.  My ongoing work shows how numerous structural and functional aspects of the organization of sensory systems can be understood as adaptations to efficiently process the information in natural stimuli, subject to the metabolic, spatial, temporal and noise constraints inherent in biological computation.  I aim to develop these ideas into a framework for explaining the structural and functional organization of cortical circuitry.

I have also written on problems in statistical inference and machine learning, and in particular on “Occam’s Razor”, i.e., the tradeoff between simplicity and accuracy in quantitative models.