Bingni Brunton PhD

Bingni W. Brunton is an Assistant Professor in the Biology department at UW, supported by the Washington Research Foundation (WRF) through the new UW Institute of Neuroengineering (UWIN). She is also a Data Science Fellow of the UW eScience Institute and a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience. She considers herself primarily a computational neuroscientist interested in how networks of neurons compute and also how computational methods help us understand measurements from neurons. She is also broadly interested in visualizing, manipulating, and understanding complex, dynamic data, particularly from biologically relevant systems.

Previously, Brunton was a postdoc at UW working with Nathan Kutz in the Applied Math department and Tom Daniel in the Biology department. She learned a lot about computational techniques that exploit inherent sparsity in complex data; she and her collaborators continue to develop data-driven, low-dimensional dynamic models for biological and engineered systems.

Brunton grew up in Maryland (MBHS) and was an undergrad at Caltech, where she majored in biology. Afterwards, she went to Princeton and studied neuroscience with Carlos Brody. In Carlos’s lab, she trained rodents to perform decision-making tasks and developed computational models to help us understand the mechanisms underlying their behavior. She also did some experimental work in electrophysiology, neuropharmacology, and human psychophysics.