Adrienne Fairhall

Biosketch

Adrienne Fairhall is a US/Australian computational neuroscientist and Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. She attended the Australian National University, where she earned a first class honors degree and University Medal in physics. For her masters and PhD in physics, at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, she worked on problems in turbulence. She turned to neuroscience through postdoctoral fellowships at NEC Research Institute and Princeton University before starting her lab at the University of Washington in 2004. She co-directs the UW Computational Neuroscience Center. She has received awards from the Society for Neuroscience, the Biophysical Society, the Allen Family Foundation and the McKnight Foundation. She was a 2022 Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Scholar.

Research Interests

Adrienne Fairhall’s research uses mathematical modeling and analysis to explore the biophysical and circuit bases of neural function, encompassing sensory processing, cognition and motor learning. She works collaboratively with experimentalists on many experimental systems to characterize and model the neural activity that supports these distinct brain functions. She has contributed significantly to the understanding of dynamic sensory coding, and to revealing learning algorithms through decoding dopamine signals during naturalistic behavior in drosophila and birds. With her collaborators, her work in the birdsong system seeks to understand the circuit mechanisms of song variability, learning and recovery from perturbation. She is further interested in neural dynamics underlying primate cognitive function during complex navigational and foraging tasks and in brain/body interactions mediated through biomechanics.