Salk Scientist Tatyana Sharpee receives CAREER award from NSF

September 11, 2013

Salk Scientist Tatyana Sharpee receives CAREER award from NSF

$453,000 in funds to support an advanced study of the neural architectures that enable object recognition

September 11, 2013

LA JOLLA, CA—Salk scientist Tatyana Sharpee has received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund upcoming research in her lab. The CAREER award supports faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

An associate professor in the Labor für computergestützte Neurobiologie, Sharpee will receive $453,000 over the next five years to fund her proposed study: “Characterizing feature selectivity and invariance in deep neural architectures.” In an effort to help elucidate the principles that make robust object recognition possible, she will explore how an organism’s neurons are able to demonstrate both “invariance,” which produces a similar response to the same object even when observed from different viewpoints, and “selectivity,” which requires different responses to potentially quite similar objects. The results of her study will help reveal the common principles of sensory processing in the brain and may ultimately lead to improved designs of artificial recognition systems, including sensory prostheses.

Sharpee received her Ph.D. in Physics at Michigan State University and was a Sloan-Swartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. In the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, Sharpee and her team work on theoretical principles of how the brain processes information.

Über das Salk Institute for Biological Studies:

Das Salk Institute for Biological Studies ist eine der weltweit führenden Institutionen für Grundlagenforschung, an der international renommierte Fakultätsmitglieder grundlegende Fragen der Biowissenschaften in einem einzigartigen, kollaborativen und kreativen Umfeld untersuchen. Mit dem Fokus auf Entdeckungen und die Ausbildung zukünftiger Forschergenerationen leisten Salk-Wissenschaftler bahnbrechende Beiträge zu unserem Verständnis von Krebs, Alterung, Alzheimer, Diabetes und Infektionskrankheiten durch die Untersuchung von Neurowissenschaften, Genetik, Zell- und Pflanzenbiologie sowie verwandten Disziplinen.

Die Leistungen der Fakultät wurden mit zahlreichen Auszeichnungen gewürdigt, darunter Nobelpreise und Mitgliedschaften in der National Academy of Sciences. Das 1960 vom Polio-Impfstoff-Pionier Dr. Jonas Salk gegründete Institut ist eine unabhängige gemeinnützige Organisation und ein architektonisches Wahrzeichen.

About the NSF:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year 2012, its budget was $7 billion. NSF funds reach all fifty states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions.