David Sussillo

Official Story

David Sussillo attended Carnegie Mellon University for a BS in Computer Science and received both an MS in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Columbia University. While at Columbia, he trained under Prof. Larry Abbott in computational and theoretical neuroscience. Afterward, David did his postdoctoral work at Stanford University with Prof. Krishna Shenoy, applying his Ph.D. work to complex neurophysiological data. After his postdoctoral research, David became a scientist in the Google Brain AI research group for six years focused on understanding how artificial neural networks function and applying those lessons to neural data. Now David is an adjunct professor at Stanford University and works at Meta Reality Labs. In his professional pursuits, David manages a team of scientists who work to develop brain-machine interfaces for use in the next generation of computers. In his academic pursuits, David works within the connectionist paradigm to understand the ghost in the machine--how cells in our brain collectively give rise to the computations that determine our behavior. David is the recipient of a Fulbright research grant and is an internationally recognized neuroscientist with over 40 publications and three patents. His academic research is funded by the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain and the National Institutes of Health.

Unofficial Story

When I was a kid, part of the lore I received about my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was that it was the center of the national heroin epidemic in the 1970s. It made perfect sense to me--both my parents were heroin addicts. Having drug-addicted parents meant orphanages and separation from family. With my father splitting the scene early on, and my mother's chronic stays in mental institutions, I found myself bounced in and out of group homes. I lived with hundreds of other kids of all races, colors, and creeds in similar situations. I was embraced and ignored, encouraged and beat up, mentored and forgotten. By the time I went to college, I'd been under the long-term supervision of no fewer than thirteen sets of house parents and saw family only on holidays or sometimes in the summer.

My unofficial story is one of group homes and of growing up in the chaos and neglect inherent in having addicted parents and institutional living. It's a story of poverty, survival, perseverance, and hope. I was a bright kid, but I wasn't an iron robot immune to my surroundings, or a hero from another planet, so cerebrally focused that I didn't notice anything outside myself. The profound, the beautiful, and the terrible--they all imprinted on me. If I wanted to be melodramatic, I'd say my unofficial story is a tale of life and death, of miracles and misfortune, as seen through the eyes of an orphan. But I made it, partly due to my intellect but largely thanks to many others and their thousand acts of kindness, many small and a few immeasurably large.

My unofficial story is a journey from the blighted Albuquerque neighborhood known as The War Zone, through the care of a revolving-door series of "house parents" at the Albuquerque Christian Children's Home, to a boarding school in Pennsylvania for underprivileged kids called the Milton Hershey School (featured recently in Invisible Child by Andrea Elliot), and still more house parents until I finally graduated high school.

Because of my intellectual abilities, I did well enough in high school to be accepted into Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science program. Still, the specter of my past pursued me. In college, I took the most challenging classes I could find. I could only see my value as a human being through my performance in the classroom--a notion that had sustained me during the many years of group home life. I had to discover for myself wisdom in the adage, "no matter where you go, there you are."

For reasons I couldn't understand, by age twenty-three, my life fell apart as I endured unending, intensely painful panic attacks. Finally, I got into psychotherapy and began the slow process of confronting my past. Ultimately, I got my head screwed on straight and began a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience. I met and married a wonderful woman and have been happily married for the last seventeen years. Now I enjoy a career as a neuroscientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and mentor. I sincerely hope that our understanding of the brain will one day be great enough to address the problems of mental illness and drug addiction.