Hello, my name is Ammar! I'm a PhD student working with Talia Konkle & George Alvarez at Harvard. My work combines computational modeling with empirical methods to study the brain & mind. I have a lot of fun and am incredibly lucky that I get to do this every day (and get paid for it, too!). See my publications to get a sense of my most recent work.
Ultimately, I hope to understand the consequences of functional architecture & task objective in shaping high-level perception & cognition. How can we develop constrained models of human perception that accurately capture both neural and behavioral responses? And how do complex perceptual mechanisms emerge from more simple, basic principles? All of this in service of understanding the principles underlying biological & artificial intelligence.
Before starting grad school I was having the time of my life with Nancy Kanwisher at MIT. Even further back, I was raised in a city east of Los Angeles by an awe-inspiring mom and two older sisters. We are a tight-knit bunch.