Danyal Akarca

Principles of intelligence in brains and machines

About me

I lead a growing group at Imperial College London aiming to discover shared principles of efficient intelligence between natural and artificial systems.

In 2024, I was awarded a joint Imperial College Research Fellowship and Schmidt Sciences Fellowship, in addition to a Nature Computes Better Opportunity Seed from the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). In 2023, I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. I previously trained as a medical doctor with a research focus on neurosurgery and neuroanatomy.

The core belief running through our research is that by inferring the latent principles of efficient computation we see in nature and reverse-engineering them, we can fuel the growth of entirely new paradigms of intelligence. Modern architectures powerfully exploit one core principle: scale through immense parallelism. What new principles will fuel the future generations of efficient intelligent systems?

My work has been featured by outlets including the University of Cambridge and Nature Machine Intelligence. My primary interests include:

Team members

  • My goal is to uncover unifying principles of intelligence we find in nature, like the brain, and distill their core principles into artificial systems of intelligence.

    Link: Google Scholar

    Email: d.akarca@imperial.ac.uk

    Mentored by Dr Daniel Goodman in the Neural Reckoning Group

  • Post-doctoral Research Scientist

    Pengfei works on developing brain-inspired neural networks, with a particular focus on delay learning and neuromorphic applications.

    Link: Google Scholar

    Email: p.sun@imperial.ac.uk

    Supervised by Dr Danyal Akarca and Co-supervised by Dr Daniel Goodman

  • Post-doctoral Research Scientist

    Yang researches neural computational principles for robust perception and data-efficient learning that exploit intrinsic hardware stochasticity and latency.

    Email: y.chu16@imperial.ac.uk

    Supervised by Dr Danyal Akarca and Co-supervised by Dr Daniel Goodman

  • PhD Student

    Jatin works on interpretable machine learning applied to neuroscience, including spatially embedded neural networks.

    Email: j.sharma24@imperial.ac.uk

    Supervised by Dr Danyal Akarca & Co-supervised by Dr Daniel Goodman

My team sits within the Intelligent Systems and Networks Group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Imperial’s flagship AI initiative, I-X.

We work in very close collaboration with both Dr Daniel Goodman’s Neural Reckoning Group and Dr Jascha Achterberg.

Interested in joining us? Send me an email at d.akarca@imperial.ac.uk.

Previous Master’s Students

  • 2024 - 2025: Jack Cook @ Oxford,
    Co-Supervised with Dr Jascha Achterberg & Prof Rui Ponte Costa, now pursuing a PhD at MIT.

  • 2024 - 2025: Robert Crossen @ Cambridge,
    Co-Supervised with Prof Petra Vértes, now pursuing a PhD at Cambridge.

  • 2024 - 2025: Guillermo Adell Vega @ Imperial, Co-Supervised with Dr Daniel Goodman, now pursing entrepreneurship in London.

  • 2022 - 2023: Cornelia Sheeran @ Cambridge, Co-Supervised with Dr Jascha Achterberg, now pursuing a PhD at University of Michigan.

  • 2022 - 2023: Andrew Ham @ Cambridge,
    Co-Supervised with Dr Jascha Achterberg, now pursuing Medicine at Harvard University.

Some highlights

Papers. To get a flavour of some of my interests:

Here are links to my Google Scholar and GitHub.

Writing & talks. I give talks/write, and occasionally they are recorded/published:

Contact me

You can email me at d.akarca@imperial.ac.uk or chat to me @DanAkarca.

I’m particularly interested to speak with:

  • People who are interested in collaborating at the intersection of brain-inspired neural computation, AI and hardware.

  • Funders who are interested in scaling novel architectures in AI via unconventional hardware acceleration.

  • People who are interested in accelerating scientific discovery in the natural sciences.