Isaac Kauvar

Isaac Kauvar is neuroscientist and engineer interested in how animals construct and deploy models of the world. As a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Nick Haber, he is interested in advancing curiosity-driven algorithms to investigate how animals and robots explore.

Isaac studied optics as an Engineering Physics major at Stanford. He obtained an M.S. in Electrical Engineering with a focus on machine learning from Stanford and has worked at Apple and Google X. He completed a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford with Professor Karl Deisseroth and Professor Gordon Wetzstein. For his dissertation, he developed optical tools for recording neural activity from thousands of neurons across the brain of an awake mouse. He further applied these tools to discover how cortex-spanning neuronal populations support deployment of internal models during goal-directed behavior.