Bahareh Tolooshams
Bahareh Tolooshams

Assistant Professor,
ECE, University of Alberta
Fellow, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)
Member, Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute (NMHI)

[email] [scholar] [github] [NeuBahar Lab]

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
- Karl Popper


I am the PI of NeuBahar Lab (Neuro–Bayesian AI for Human-interpretable Abstractions and Representation Learning). I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta and an Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) Fellow. Amii is a world-leading AI institute. I am also a member of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute (NMHI). I received my PhD in May 2023 from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where I was also an affiliate to the Center for Brain Science. Before joining the University of Alberta, I was a postdoctoral researcher and held the Swartz Foundation Fellowship Theoretical Neuroscience for two years at AI for Science Lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). During my PhD, I also worked at Amazon AI and Microsoft as a Research Intern. I have BASc degree with distinction from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Mentorship and community building: During my time at Harvard University, I actively mentored Harvard College students through the Women in STEM Mentorship program. I was also a mentor at InTouch, a peer-to-peer support network to build community and provide support for graduate students.

How to join NeuBahar Lab
News
  • 06/2025: I have joined the University of Alberta as an Assistant Professor.
  • 03/2025: I have received Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Brain-Machine Interface Grant Award at Caltech.
  • 07/2024: I have co-initiated and co-lead a NeurReps Global Speaker Series.
  • 04/2024: I am part of the 2024 NeurReps at NeurIPS workshop organizing team.
  • 01/2024: I co-led (with Geeling Chau) the Caltech Neuro+ML journal club during my time at Caltech.
  • 10/2023: I have won a Rising Stars Award in Conference on Parsimony and Learning.
  • 10/2023: I am named as a Rising Star in UChicago Data Science.
  • 06/2023: I have received Swartz Foundation Fellowship for Postdoctoral Research in Theoretical Neuroscience.
  • 06/2023: I have joined Anima AI + Science Lab at Caltech for a postdoc.
  • 05/2023: I received my PhD degree from Harvard University.
  • 02/2022: I joined InTouch, a peer-to-peer support network to build community and provide support for graduate students.
  • 05/2021: I joined the Applied Sciences Group at Microsoft as a Research Intern.
  • 07/2019: I received AWS Machine Learning Research Awards (MLRA).
  • 04/2019: I joined Amazon AI as ML/DSP Research Intern.
  • 04/2019: I received QBio Student Fellowship.
  • 08/2018: I received QBio Student Award Competition Fellowship.
  • 09/2017: I started my graduate studies at CRISP Group at Harvard University.
  • 06/2017: I received my B.ASc. degree with distinction in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.