Program Manager
IARPA
David A. Markowitz, PhD is a Program Manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the high-risk, high-reward research arm of the United States Intelligence Community. Currently, Dr. Markowitz runs two highly-collaborative programs at the interface between biology and engineering: the “Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks” (MICrONS) program, a BRAIN Initiative program that seeks to develop more capable machine learning algorithms by using large-scale neuroscience structure-function data as a guide; and the “Molecular Information Storage” (MIST) program, which seeks to use sequence-controlled polymers (such as DNA) as the basis for novel storage devices that substantially reduce the footprint and resource requirements of exabyte-scale data centers. Dr. Markowitz holds an S.B. in Management Science from MIT and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Neuroscience from Princeton University, where he also completed DOE-sponsored fellowship training in high-performance computing. His published neuroscience research seeks a mechanistic understanding of computation in the brain at multiple scales, ranging from spike timing-based computation in small networks to the organization and dynamics of large networks that support working memory in prefrontal cortex.