Bio:

Shinya Ito is Scientist III in Anton Arkhipov’s team at the Allen Institute. He develops biologically realistic models of the mouse primary visual cortex, integrating electron-microscopy- and electrophysiology-derived connectivity with machine-learning optimization to reveal how circuit structure supports computation and to advance biologically grounded AI. Trained as a physicist (B.S., Hokkaido University), he earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Indiana University with John Beggs, mapping functional neuronal connectivity, and completed postdoctoral work at UC Santa Cruz with Alan Litke and David Feldheim, pioneering high-density silicon-probe recordings of the mouse superior colliculus to characterize its visual and auditory responses. Ito now combines large-scale simulations, TensorFlow-based training, and the Allen Institute’s in-house Brain Modeling ToolKit (BMTK), to which he is an active contributor, to build, train, and analyze realistic cortical networks.