Tomaso Poggio

Tomaso Poggio is the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds a position at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He serves as Co-Director of the Center for Biological and Computational Learning (CBCL) and is an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a role he assumed in 2000 after joining the MIT faculty in 1981 following a decade at the Max Planck Institute for Biology and Cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany.

A foundational figure in computational neuroscience, Poggio pioneered models of the fly's visual system and human stereovision, introduced regularization theory to computational vision, and made seminal contributions to the biophysics of computation and learning theory. His research bridges neuroscience and artificial intelligence, with significant impact on deep learning, pattern recognition, and computational vision. He is recognized as one of the most cited researchers in his field due to his influential model of visual cortex recognition.

Dr. Poggio's distinguished honors include:

• the Otto-Hahn-Medaille Award of the Max-Planck-Society
• the Max Planck Research Award (with M. Fahle) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
• the MIT 50K Entrepreneurship Competition Award
• the 2003 Gabor Award
• the 2009 Okawa prize

He holds memberships in the Italian Academy of Sciences as a Foreign Member and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a Fellow. His leadership at CBCL and the McGovern Institute drives interdisciplinary research integrating biological principles with computational models to advance artificial intelligence and neural understanding.