Xaq Pitkow

Assistant Professor

Department of Neuroscience

Dr. Pitkow joined Baylor College of Medicine in 2013 and holds a joint appointment at Rice University as an assistant professor in the electrical and computer engineering department. He earned his Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University after completing his Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Princeton University. He completed postdoctoral research fellowships at Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and at the University of Rochester in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. While at Harvard he was also a teaching fellow.

Pitkow’s research is focused primarily on vision and how the brain transforms low-level visual features like oriented edges into higher-level representations of object properties. This work will have broader implication on other sensory systems, how neural representations are learned and transformed, and whether those representations are efficient in a quantifiable sense.

He has published his research in numerous scientific journals and has been an invited guest lecturer at university events.

Articles about Dr. Pitkow:

• McNair Scholar Spotlight: Dr. Xaq Pitkow
• Two new McNair Scholars named at BCM