Gabriel Kreiman

Gabriel Kreiman is an Argentine‑American neuroscientist. He is a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital,^[1] and the associate director of the MIT–Harvard Center for Brains, Minds & Machines (CBMM).^[2] His research lies at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and spans a wide range of topics, including episodic memory, visual perception, single‑neuron physiology, psychophysics, and computational modeling of artificial intelligence.

Gabriel Kreiman received a Licenciado (B.S.) in physical chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires in 1996, followed by an M.S. in computation and neural systems and a Ph.D. in biology (2002) from the California Institute of Technology, supervised by Christof Koch. His dissertation examined neuron‑level correlates of visual awareness in humans.^[3] After post‑doctoral work with Tomaso Poggio at MIT, he joined Harvard Medical School.^[2]

Kreiman's research has addressed how visual information is represented by neurons in the human brain. Using intracranial recordings from epilepsy patients, Kreiman and colleagues reported that individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe exhibit selective and invariant responses to complex visual stimuli such as faces and landmarks.^[4] Follow-up studies involving humans and macaques identified neurons that maintain similar responses across different views of the same person or object.^[5]

Kreiman has contributed to the development of computational models based on neural mechanisms. In collaboration with William Lotter and David Cox, he co-developed PredNet, a recurrent neural network designed for next-frame video prediction using principles of predictive coding.^[6] The architecture and its relation to theories of brain function have been discussed in scientific and popular press.^[7] Kreiman's group has also proposed continual learning algorithms informed by biological memory systems.^[8]

In studies of episodic memory, Kreiman and colleagues identified "boundary cells" in the human hippocampus that are active at the transitions between distinct events.^[9] These findings have been noted in reports by scientific organizations.^[10]

Kreiman is a recipient of the NIH Director's New Innovator Award (2009–2014), and a winner of the NSF CAREER Award (2010–2014). He received the Pisart Award for Vision Research from the Lighthouse Guild in 2015,^[11] and was named a McKnight Scholar by the McKnight Foundation in 2017.^[12]

He is also a recipient of the Society for Neuroscience Career Development Award (2010),^[13] the Klingenstein Fund Award in Neuroscience (2007),^[14] the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize (2002),^[15] and the Lawrence L. and Audrey W. Ferguson Prize (2002) from the California Institute of Technology.^[16]

A 2019 collaboration involving Kreiman, Carlos Ponce, and Margaret Livingstone, which used artificial intelligence to generate images that strongly activate monkey face-processing neurons, was covered in several media outlets. The study was reported by Science^[17] and The Atlantic.^[18] The work was also discussed in Wired^[19] and Quanta Magazine,^[7] and was featured on Science Friday.^[20]

• Kreiman Laboratory