Tomaso A Poggio

Tomaso A. Poggio is the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He also serves as Director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and is an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research focuses on computational neuroscience, machine learning, and the theoretical foundations of deep learning.

Dr. Poggio holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Genoa (1971) and has held roles at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (1972–1981) before joining MIT. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Founding Fellow of AAAI, with an h-index exceeding 100 (Google Scholar).

His research interests include neural network architectures, adversarial robustness, generalization bounds, and biologically plausible learning mechanisms. He has pioneered work on hierarchical learning, neural collapse, and the interplay between SGD and network rank minimization. Key contributions span computational vision, invariant recognition, and the theoretical underpinnings of deep learning.

Poggio’s awards include the Otto-Hahn-Medaille (Max Planck Society), the Okawa Prize (2009), and the Swartz Prize (2014). His labs and initiatives bridge neuroscience, AI, and cognitive science to address fundamental questions in intelligence.