Ari Benjamin

I am a computational neuroscientist specializing in neural networks and their relationship to the brain.

About half my work is theoretical. I study the properties of neural networks, and see them as a general model class for how the brain might work. I am also very interested in the aspects of the brain not currently captured by neural networks, such as the role of neuromodulators like serotonin and the wild diversity of cell types.

The other half of my work is data analysis. I develop machine learning algorithms to analyze neural data, especially data which reveals cellular diversity, such as single-cell RNA sequencing. Recently I built TissueFormer, a transformer that predicts sample-level phenotypes from populations of single cells (BMC Bioinformatics, 2026), and I use methods like it to link cellular diversity to the function of neural circuits.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Tony Zador at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I completed my PhD with Konrad Kording at the University of Pennsylvania.