Ila Fiete

Timeline

1. By 2004

   A physics PhD at Harvard

   She grows up between Mumbai and the United States and studies mathematics and physics at the University of Michigan. In 2004, she earns a physics PhD at Harvard University. Most of her doctoral research takes place in Sebastian Seung’s lab at MIT, where she studies how signals about head movement control eye position.

2. 2004–2008

   Postdocs and a Texas appointment

   From 2004 to 2006, she holds a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, while also serving as a visiting member of the Center for Theoretical Biophysics at the University of California, San Diego. She spends two years at Caltech as a Broad Fellow in brain circuitry. In 2008, she joins the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.

3. 2009

   A grid-cell navigation model

   In 2009, she coauthors “Accurate path integration in continuous attractor network models of grid cells,” published in PLOS Computational Biology.

4. 2016

   HHMI Faculty Scholar

   In 2016, she is selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin.

5. 2018–2019

   Joining MIT and McGovern

   She joins MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences as an associate professor with tenure in 2018. In 2019, she joins the McGovern Institute for Brain Research as an associate investigator, studying circuits involved in short-term memory, integration and inference.

6. October 2021

   Directing the ICoN Center

   In October 2021, she is named to lead MIT’s new K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center at the McGovern Institute. The center brings together researchers to develop mathematical models and computational tools for understanding brain function and mental health.

7. 2022

   The Swartz Prize

   In 2022, she receives the Society for Neuroscience’s Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience for her research modeling grid cells and the brain’s navigation system. With her collaborators, she develops models explaining how interactions between neurons produce and stabilize grid-cell firing patterns for spatial memory.

8. January 2025

   A model of episodic memory

   She is the senior author of “Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus,” published in Nature in January 2025. The model connects grid cells with hippocampal cells to explain how memories of places and events are stored, including the gradual loss of detail in older memories and the use of memory palaces.

9. 2025

   Latent memories in language models

   In 2025, she coauthors “Uncovering Latent Memories in Large Language Models” with Sunny Duan, Mikail Khona, Abhiram Iyer and Rylan Schaeffer at ICLR. The study shows that sequences encountered during training can remain recoverable in a language model after appearing unmemorized, and introduces a test based on cross-entropy loss to detect these latent memories.

10. As of October 2026

    Professor and ICoN director

    As of October 2026, she is a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute, and director of the K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center. Her group studies memory, inference and learning in the brain and in deep networks; a January 2026 seminar at Washington University in St. Louis presents her work on associative and episodic memory.