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Sophia Sanborn

Postdoctoral Scholar
University of California, Santa Barbara
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I received my PhD from UC Berkeley in 2021, under the mentorship of Bruno Olshausen in the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. I’m currently appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I work with Nina Miolane on applications of group theory and differential geometry to deep learning and neuroscience. I hold affiliate appointments in the Department of Mathematics and Department of Biomedical Engineering at UBC, with collaborators Khanh Dao Duc and Manu Madhav.

My research has been supported by the PIMS-Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship, the NSF GRFP, and the Beinecke Scholarship. I’ve worked as a researcher in Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab and AI Division, and have provided teaching support for Berkeley’s graduate-level Machine Learning and Neural Computation courses. 

Community organization is an important aspect of my work. I co-organize the NeurIPS Workshop on Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations (NeurReps) and the ICML Workshop on Topology, Algebra, and Geometry in Machine Learning (TAG-ML). In 2024, we are taking NeurReps to the Canadian wilderness for a 5-day workshop at the Banff International Research Station.