Description

Saul Kato is director of the Foundations of Cognition Laboratory and assistant professor of neurology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Kato has a background in neurobiology, theoretical physics, mathematics, computer science and hardware and software. After studying many-body quantum mechanics with Nobelist Bob Laughlin as an undergraduate at Stanford University, Dr. Kato spent a decade as an engineer and tech entrepreneur before returning to science; he founded, financed, built, and sold two technology companies: Sven Technologies, which developed software algorithms and applications for 3D graphics rendering, and WideRay Corp., which pioneered the idea of local ad-hoc wireless content delivery, manufacturing and building a network of several thousand local content delivery points in fifteen countries. After earning his PhD from Columbia University in 2013–a computational-experimental project determining the signal processing properties of the nematode C. elegans neurons–Dr. Kato became an EMBO Long-Term Fellow in the lab of Manuel Zimmer at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Kato and his team study the relationship between the dynamics of brain-wide activity and behavior in C. elegans in search of basic principles and building blocks of neural computation and cognitive function.