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.

I am also interested in how we can leverage AI to accelerate science and benefit human health. Most recently, I have worked on a project which employs agentic systems to help scientists create hierarchical Bayesian models of their data. For more details of other research directions such as AI interpretability and safety, please see my interpretability project page and steering preprint.

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.