Hertz Fellows DJ Strouse

DJ Strouse's research focuses on trying to understand the design principles of biological systems. In particular, he tries to understand organisms as solutions to the computational problems that they face. By doing so, his and related research tries to provide "why" answers in a field traditionally focused on the "what" and "how." In addition, this type of approach often leads to the fascinating realization that many biological systems approach optimality, that is the limits set by basic physical or statistical limits. In all cases, this approach necessitates a tight coupling between experimental and theoretical work and, on the theory side, liberal borrowing of tools from other fields, including statistical physics, information theory, machine learning, and dynamical systems.
Most of DJ's recent work has focused on theoretical neuroscience. He has built a model of how synaptic plasticity and dendritic structure enable brains to rapidly and robustly encode information presented only once (with Bartlett Mel's neural computation group at USC), studied how olfactory information is represented in the brain of mice during sniffing (with collaborators from Israel, Ger- many, and the US), built models for the role that dendrites play in single-neuron computations (on a Churchill Scholarship with Mate Lengyel's computational learning and memory group at Cambridge), and formalized and explored the idea that sensory neural networks might be optimized to respond quickly to new stimuli by doing a mix of prediction and "anticipation", i.e. sitting in network states which have fast transition times to states corresponding to likely stimuli (as a side project). He recently started a PhD in physics with Professor William Bialek at Princeton University, where he plans to continue his neuroscience research as well as branch out into other areas of biology. He is currently interested in prediction and inference in biological systems.
When he is not doing science, DJ is often thinking about how to improve how science is done. From 2009-2012, he co-founded an open source, online platform for scientific collaboration called CoLab, which debuted at the Open Science Summit 2010. The goal of CoLab was to enable online collaboration around any piece of scientific content and to increase the speed of information-sharing among scientists and between scientists and the public. Although their initial attempt at popularizing open science was a bit too ambitious to sustain, he and his co-conspirators look forward to similarly spirited projects in the near future.
When he is neither doing science nor trying to improve how it is done, DJ enjoys traveling, running, hiking, mountaineering, and other outdoor pursuits. He has worked or lived a month or more in Canada, China, India, Italy, England, Hungary, and Poland and traveled more briefly to many other countries. Some of his favorite experiences include trekking between Berber villages in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains, solo backpacking the Tour du Mont Blanc in the Alps, and road tripping through the American Southwest. He was born in Elgin, Illinois, raised in Newark, Delaware, and educated at the University of Southern California (undergraduate) and University of Cambridge (master's).