Hi! I’m Anamika (she/her), a computational neuroscientist and theoretical biologist asking how the physical organization of neurons shapes what they can compute, how they learn, and why they fail.
My research sits at the intersection of biophysics, computational theory, and neuroscience. I build models that are biologically grounded but analytically tractable: the kind that can say something general rather than just describe one dataset. The through-line across everything I do is a single organizing idea: the brain computes under constraint, and understanding those constraints (energetic, structural, morphological) is the key to understanding both normal function and disease.
I trained as a physicist (IIT Bombay → PhD in Biophysics at UC San Diego, with Elena Koslover), where I studied how neurons maintain metabolic stability across their extended, asymmetric arbors. From 2022 to 2025, I was a Shanahan Foundation Fellow at the Allen Institute and the University of Washington, an independent fellowship that let me pivot fully into computational and theoretical neuroscience and build a research program of my own. That pivot, from physical biology to neuroscience, was a deliberate bet on where I thought the most interesting open questions were, and I haven’t looked back.
My current work spans three connected threads: how dendritic morphology bounds and shapes neuronal computation (one paper at NeurIPS 2025, more coming); how those same structural constraints determine what plasticity rules a neuron can express; and how physical limits become failure modes in neurodegeneration (a Bayesian framework for Alzheimer’s progression, in press at the Annals of Applied Statistics, and applied in a Nature Neuroscience atlas of Alzheimer’s disease).
I’m currently looking for faculty and group leader positions where I can build a lab around these questions. I am equally eager to explore research scientist roles that offer the collaborative environment and resources necessary to tackle these questions. If you’re interested in chatting about research, potential collaborations, or just want to say hi, please feel free to reach out!
Outside of science: I write (slowly), read (voraciously), and share a single functioning brain cell with my two cats, Twix (tortie) and Munch (torbie). On good days, I have the brain cell. On other days, one of them is sitting on my laptop.