Dr. Kanaka Rajan

As a teenager in India, Kanaka Rajan decided early on that she wanted to be a scientist. After completing her undergraduate degree in engineering, Kanaka pursued a PhD at Brandeis, stepping out of her math and theory-based comfort zone and diving into the deep end of experimental neuroscience in her rotations. She eventually returned to a more computational lab with Professor Larry Abbott, where she developed a neural network model of neural sensory dynamics. In her postdoctoral research at Princeton, Kanaka branched out again into a more holistic approach to neuroscience, integrating her computational skills with those of collaborating experimentalists. With the help of her collaborators at Princeton, she developed a theory of sensory signal processing that could produce complex decision-making behaviors. Now, in her lab in New York at the Friedman Brain Institute, Kanaka continues to approach neuroscientific questions about sensory neural dynamics holistically, combining both theory and experiments. Beyond science, Kanaka is dedicated to cultivating a diverse and supportive academic community where people of all backgrounds can be both hired and fully supported in their trajectories to success.