The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard is pleased to announce the appointment of Boaz Barak, Samuel Gershman, Susan Murphy and DBMI's Marinka Zitnik as associate faculty members. 

The four new appointees are current Harvard faculty members whose pioneering work advances the Kempner Institute’s scientific mission of studying the intersection of natural and artificial intelligence. They begin their appointments at the Kempner on July 1, joining four previously announced associate faculty members to comprise the Kempner’s inaugural cohort of associate faculty, who will help to shape the Institute’s educational and research priorities.

Zitnik Lab member Ada Fang is also an inaugural Kempner Institute Graduate Student Fellow.

In addition, the Faculty Steering Committee of the Kempner Institute includes DBMI Chair Isaac Kohane as well as Center for Computational Biology Executive Director Robert Gentleman, who is also a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

The Kempner Institute seeks to understand the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems by recruiting and training future generations of researchers to study intelligence from biological, cognitive, engineering, and computational perspectives. Its bold premise is that the fields of natural and artificial intelligence are intimately interconnected; the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) will require the same principles that our brains use for fast, flexible natural reasoning, and understanding how our brains compute and reason can be elucidated by theories developed for AI.