Sven Dorkenwald

Principal Investigator

Sven will start as an investigator at the McGovern Institute and assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in January 2026.

Sven earned his BS in physics in 2014 and MS in computer engineering in 2017 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. There, he began his research in connectomics as an undergraduate in the group of Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. Seeking to continue research in connectomics, he went on to complete his PhD at Princeton University in 2023, where he studied computer science and neuroscience under the mentorship of Sebastian Seung and Mala Murthy. During his PhD, Sven joined the neuromancer team at Google Research in 2020 as a student researcher and later as a visiting faculty researcher. Following his PhD, Sven moved to the Allen Institute and University of Washington in 2023 as a Shanahan Foundation Fellow.