Growing Up in Academia with Ida Momennejad

What is it to be a scientist? How does one become a scientist? Growing Up in Academia is a conversation series with academics at different levels of their career focusing on the sometimes short, sometimes long and winding roads behind the “official CV”.

Each event features an open conversation (interview) with a different faculty member, representing the broad spectrum of academic life. We will cover topics such as dealing with expectations (your own and others’), the role of luck/coincidence in scientific discovery, impostor syndrome, procrastination, and conflicts with advisors. Join us for a conversation about the human factors that universally inform the profession, but that too often remain unspoken. These events will be hosted and presented by Lucia Melloni (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics). 

On Monday, November 29, 2021, Growing Up in Academia features Ida Momennejad, senior Reinforcement Learning researcher at Microsoft Research NYC.

The online application for this event is Zoom. You can register for the event here.

Offical CV

​I'm a senior Reinforcement Learning researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. Every Friday (4 PM ET) I cohost The Learning Salon(with Joshua Vogelstein and John Krakauer). If you prefer podcasts,BrainInspired& Parsing Science have kindly featured my work.

BrainInspired also featured podcasts of our panels on Deep RL and Dopamine & Advancing Neuro Deep learning.

I study how we build models of the world and use them in memory, exploration, & planning. I build and test neurally plausible algorithms for learning the structure of the environment. My approach combines reinforcement learning, neural networks, & machine learning with behavioral experiments, fMRI, & electrophysiology.​

My training is in cognitive computational neuroscience (via computer science and philosophy). I've previously worked at Columbia University, Electrophysiology, Memory, and Navigation Lab, did my postdoc at Princeton (where I collaborated with Ken Norman, Matt Botvinick, Jon Cohen, Nathaniel Daw), my PhD was in psychology (Berlin, Germany, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience), BSc in software engineering (Tehran, Iran), & MSc in Philosophy of Science (Utrecht, Netherlands).

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