Official Story
In 1992, Nathaniel Daw received a BA summa cum laude from Columbia University. In 2003, he received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University working with David Touretzky on computational models of the dopamine system. He joined NYU's Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology as an assistant professor in 2007, following a postdoc at the Gatbsy Computational Neuroscience with Peter Dayan. He received tenure in 2012 and moved to Princeton University's psychology department and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute as a full professor in 2015.
Unofficial Story
Nathaniel's chief and perhaps only honor in college was winning a bad poetry contest by spraying a copy of Kant's Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals with Lysol. After a miserable year working in the real world, Nathaniel went to graduate school mainly because he was hopeless at actual professional responsibilities but good at taking classes; he was totally oblivious to the whole research thing. He took that position over an alternative opportunity, which was writing software to price mortgage backed securities in the World Trade Center, thereby dodging two bullets at once. A surprising number of his PhD cohort were among the first 50 employees at Google, but all Nathaniel got out of Google recruiting during that period was a pair of "I'm Feeling Lucky" boxer shorts. Having moved to the suburbs and quickly exhausted the Netflix catalog and the combinatoric possibilities of Domino's pizza toppings, he slinks back to NYU this afternoon cap in hand, twitching and begging for his former position or at least some half-decent takeaway.