James DiCarlo

Timeline

1. 1990–1998

   Engineering and medical degrees

   DiCarlo earns a BS in biomedical engineering at Northwestern University in 1990. He completes a PhD and an MD at Johns Hopkins University in 1998.

2. By 2002

   Postdoctoral research at Hopkins and Baylor

   After his doctorates in 1998, he spends a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins' Krieger Mind/Brain Institute. He continues his research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Baylor College of Medicine's Division of Neuroscience before joining MIT in 2002.

3. 2002

   Joining the MIT faculty

   In 2002, he becomes an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

4. 2012–2021

   Head of brain sciences

   He heads MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences from 2012 to 2021. With his leadership team, he develops undergraduate and graduate training programs that connect brain science with computing.

5. 2014

   Deep networks match primate vision

   In 2014, he is senior author of “Deep neural networks rival the representation of primate IT cortex for core visual object recognition” in PLOS Computational Biology. The team finds that deep neural networks match primate performance at identifying objects during a brief glance and predict neural responses in inferior temporal cortex.

6. May 2019

   Images that control visual neurons

   In May 2019, he is senior author of “Neural population control via deep image synthesis”, with MIT postdocs Pouya Bashivan and Kohitij Kar as lead authors. The team uses a neural network model to design images that drive selected neurons in visual area V4, producing about 40 percent more activity than natural images.

7. January 2021

   Director of the MIT Quest

   MIT appoints him director of its Quest for Intelligence in January 2021. The initiative studies natural intelligence and develops foundations for machine intelligence.

8. August 2021

   Brain-Score compares vision models

   In 2021, he leads Brain-Score, a collaborative effort that compares models of the brain's ventral visual stream. It ranks models by how well they predict neural responses across brain regions and a subject's choices during object identification.

9. April 2023

   American Academy membership

   In April 2023, he is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

10. As of October 2026

    Visual learning at MIT

    With Lynn Sörensen and Kohitij Kar, he reports in July 2026 that training a neural network to recognize objects produces changes that parallel learning-related changes in monkeys' inferior temporal cortex. He is the Peter de Florez Professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, director of the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence, and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.