Surya Ganguli


In January 2012, I started as an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University, with courtesy appointments in Neurobiology and Electrical Engineering. My new lab webpage will be coming soon, but for now here is a link to my applied physics website.

Before joining Stanford, I was a fellow of the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology in the Keck Center at UCSF.

I am also supported by a career award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Interfaces in Science Program.

During my time as a Sloan-Swartz fellow, I enjoyed extended stays at several centers and institutions and, in addition to UCSF, I am especially grateful to:










Before joining UCSF I did my PhD in string theory with Petr Horava in the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics and the Theory Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

And before this sojourn in the world of strings, I spent my time as an undergrad at MIT studying electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), mathematics and physics.

Although during my graduate work I played around with black holes, eleven dimensions, and little loops of string, I am now more fascinated by the world of biology which is full of incredible amounts of data but a relative paucity of theoretical frameworks within which to interpret and understand this data. The situation is quite the opposite in string theory where beautiful frameworks abound and data is sparse. My new interests span the gamut of theoretical questions in neuroscience and systems biology.