Annie Erickson

I am a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Neurobiology, advised by Dr. Michael Dickinson. I am interested in understanding the neural basis and behavior of complex systems.

My research has focused on discovering the neural circuits that control flight, an interdisciplinary project that has spanned the fields of neuroscience, aerodynamics, biomechanics, machine learning, and robotics. For more details of my work, please see my project page or my talk at the COSYNE conference.

More recently, I have become interested in the ‘neural’ circuits of intelligent machines. For more information, see my project page of ongoing research on understanding and steering large language models.

In my career, I have also studied motivation and learning circuits in the hippocampus at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the neuromodulation of cognition at Cornell University. Outside the lab, you can find me growing dragon fruit cacti or hiking in the San Gabriels.