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Melika Payvand is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, where she leads the Emerging Intelligent Substrates lab. She received her MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Her research focuses on understanding natural intelligence and implementing organizing principles in silico to develop efficient artificial intelligence (AI) systems. She is particularly fascinated by the structures of the brain at both micro and macro scales and how these structures give rise to function. This fascination drives her work on hierarchical structures that have the potential to reduce the cost of training and operating AI systems. Specifically, she explores novel memory technologies and memristive devices, as well as how changes in structure can be based on history inputs, making them promising candidates for developing emergent intelligent systems. In 2023, she was honored with the prestigious Swiss National Science Foundation Starting Grant and is an active member of the neuromorphic community. She co-coordinated the European project NEUROTECH, co-chaired the International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems (ICONS), and co-organized the scientific program for the Capocaccia Neuromorphic Intelligence workshop from 2019 to 2023. She is currently chair-elect of Neural Systems Applications IEEE Circuits Systems Society.
Department of Law