Adam S. Lowet
I like using machine learning to understand brains and using neuroscience to understand machines.
Hi there! I'm a neuro-AI researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area interested in mechanistic interpretability, reinforcement learning, systems neuroscience, and AI safety. I'm currently conducting technical research on AI alignment with the Anthropic Fellows Progam, with a focus on interpretability. As such, I am on leave leave from my academic postdoc at UC Berkeley in the lab of Michael Yartsev, where I was developing state-of-the-art ML models for predicting and decoding hippocampal activity and — crucially — using those models to reveal novel computations underlying spatial cognition in naturalistic contexts. Before that, I completed my Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Harvard, where I worked with Naoshige Uchida on the neural circuit basis of distributional RL. Feel free to reach out to me with any comments or requests for collaboration!
Recent Updates
- August 2026 Ecstatic to be named an Anthropic Fellow for AI Safety, where I'll be working on interpretability of large language models four the next four months.
- June 2026 Delighted to be named a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow for 2026!
- November 2025 Pleased to have received the Nemko Prize in Cellular or Molecular Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience.
- November 2025 Very much enjoyed giving an (opinionated) overview of the intersection of RL and neuroscience to the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club as part of their RL Debate Series!
- July 2025 Thrilled to be joining the NeuroBat Lab as a postdoctoral researcher!
- June 2025 Honored to receive the UZH Award for Research in Brain Diseases for the "pioneering discovery that the striatum can encode complete probability distributions" during my PhD.
- February 2025 Published "An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning" in Nature. (Press Release)
- December 2024 Received the Bowdoin Prize for my essay on risk and reward learning in brains and machines.
- October 2024 Succesfully defended my Ph.D. thesis at Harvard.