Boston University Faculty Brian DePasquale Named 2026 Sloan Research Fellow
Prestigious award recognizes the most promising early-career researchers in their fields
Theoretical neuroscientist Brian DePasquale has been named a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow, a prestigious honor recognizing “outstanding early-career faculty who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study,” the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today (Feb. 17).
DePasquale is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and Director of the Artificial and Biological Intelligence Laboratory. He is also a Hariri Institute for Computing Junior Faculty Fellow and a Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences Faculty Fellow.
DePasquale is widely recognized in computational neuroscience for his work on neural manifolds — the idea that complex brain activity reflects coordinated patterns across many neurons, similar to how a melody emerges from individual musicians playing together. In a 2023 Neuron paper, he showed that these patterns arise from networks of individual spiking neurons. This work laid a foundation for modern brain modeling and provided a versatile “mathematical bridge” for translating high-level AI models into biologically realistic spiking networks.
Building on this foundation, DePasquale’s lab develops mathematical models to explore how populations of neurons process information to produce behavior and applies these insights to design bio-inspired intelligent systems.
“The Sloan Research Fellowship will help advance a central goal of my research, which is to connect neuroscience and artificial intelligence,” says DePasquale.
His studies on decision-making show that different brain regions handle the same task in distinct ways: some circuits gradually accumulate information before acting, while others commit quickly. Published in eLife (2024), these findings highlight the brain’s flexibility and efficiency — qualities that many modern AI systems struggle to replicate.
“By connecting biologically realistic neural networks with AI algorithms, we can study how AI computations work and explore how similar processes might occur in real neural circuits,” says DePasquale. “These models let us study biological intelligence in systems that are both computationally powerful and biologically realistic.”
DePasquale’s work has already had broad applications, from modeling sensory processing in insects, to understanding neural circuit dynamics in rodents, to informing bio-inspired algorithms for AI. He is now extending these computational and theoretical approaches beyond neuroscience to study behavioral patterns in marine species, including fish and jellyfish, and to predict how they respond to environmental stress.
Since joining Boston University in January 2023, DePasquale has built a robust interdisciplinary research program, collaborating with faculty across Biology, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics, and the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. His lab also makes its computational methods openly available, with fully documented, reusable code that allows other researchers to reproduce and extend their work.
DePasquale earned his PhD in theoretical neuroscience at Columbia University and completed postdoctoral research at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. His work has appeared in leading journals including Neuron and Nature Neuroscience, as well as top machine learning venues such as the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). In addition to the Sloan Fellowship, his recent honors include the 2025 Scialog: Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems (NCE) award, the Boston University College of Engineering Dean’s Catalyst Award, a Hariri Institute for Computing & Computional Sciences Junior Faculty Fellowship, and a Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences Faculty Fellowship.
About the Sloan Research Fellowships
Awarded annually since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowships recognize exceptional early-career researchers at U.S. and Canadian institutions in seven fields—Chemistry, Computer Science, Earth System Science, Economics, Mathematics, Neuroscience, and Physics. Fellows are selected through peer nomination and chosen by independent panels of senior scholars based on research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become leaders in their fields. Each Fellow receives a flexible two-year, $75,000 award to support their research.
More than 1,000 researchers are nominated each year. Since its inception, 59 Sloan Fellows have won Nobel Prizes and 72 Fellows have won the National Medal of Science.