Sara Solla, Ph.D.

Sara A. Solla obtained a B.Sc. in mathematics and physics and an M.Sc. in physics at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, followed by a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she trained in statistical physics, critical phenomena and renormalization group. While a postdoc at Cornell University, she heard John Hopfield talk about memory storage and retrieval through attractor dynamics, and her life was never the same. She spent fruitful and exciting years as a member of the legendary neural networks group at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. She then joined the faculty at Northwestern University, where she is a professor of neuroscience and of physics and astronomy. Her work in theoretical and computational neuroscience uses conceptual, mathematical and computational frameworks from statistical physics, statistical inference and nonlinear dynamics to investigate information processing in the brain at the systems level. Solla has held visiting professor positions at Boston University, the École Normale Supérieure, Columbia University, the Niels Bohr Institute, NORDITA (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics), Rockefeller University, and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization in Göttingen, Germany. Since 1999, she has been a resident faculty member at the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.