cs.washington.eduRajesh Rao's research spans the areas of computational neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence. His current research focuses on how the brain learns models of the world from observations and actions, how the brain makes decisions based on noisy sensory information, and how brain signals and AI can be combined to build brain co-processors for restoring and augmenting neural function.
Rajesh received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and was a Sloan postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego before arriving at the UW. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Faculty Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. He is the author of the textbook Brain-Computer Interfacing: An Introduction and has co-edited two books, Probabilistic Models of the Brain and Bayesian Brain. He directs the Neural Systems Laboratory at UW CSE. With Adrienne Fairhall, he taught the first MOOC on Computational Neuroscience. His not-so-copious spare time is devoted to Indian art history and to understanding the ancient undeciphered script of the Indus civilization, a topic on which he has given a TED talk.