Official Story
Rodrigo Carrasco-Davis earned his undergraduate and master's degrees in electrical engineering with minors in physics, from Universidad de Chile. There, he took part in research projects spanning physics, astronomy, and machine learning, dedicating most of his undergraduate work to applying machine learning models to detect supernovae in astronomical data. He then changed fields, moving into neuroscience for his PhD at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, where he worked with Andrew Saxe. He is currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, working with Jonathan Cohen. His current research focuses on mathematical models of learning systems, meta-learning, and replay models.
Unofficial Story
Rodrigo was born in Santiago de Chile in 1992. He grew up in a very privileged family, where they shared long conversations at dinner about their problems, politics, and religion, among many other topics. A relevant aspect of these discussions was the importance of education, probably due in part to his grandfather, and to his mother's job at an NGO that assisted teachers in rural parts of Chile. This family privilege did not correspond to their financial situation, so Rodrigo went through the public education system in Chile, where kids had to "survive" to finish their mandatory education, enduring and enjoying the chaos of 45 male teenage students packed into a small dantesque classroom for 4 years. During elementary school and high school, Rodrigo went through different phases, wanting to become a medical doctor, then a musician, then he wanted to do something related to math, all of these changes influenced by particular events and people along the way. He started his undergrad by doing common courses for physics and engineering at Universidad de Chile, understanding that his problem was not to figure out what he likes, but rather that he likes too many things and doesn't understand that he can't do it all. Rodrigo was a hardworking student without the ability to prioritize the important things (it seems like he is getting better), and ended up struggling with courses, getting into weird project rabbit holes, and letting his studies collide with his personal life (a common theme in his life), making his time at university tough but fun. Undergrad also included a side quest exchange program in the US, where the idea of spending time abroad for a PhD was planted in his head. His main research during undergrad and graduate studies was applying machine learning methods to astronomy, which sparked the question of how and why neural networks work. Naively, he decided to switch to neuroscience, thinking that people studying the brain might have an answer to his questions. Fortunately, they didn't. Thanks to the wonderful researchers who nurtured him to become a scientist, the encouragement from his family and friends, and the incredible support from his (at the time) wife, Rodrigo and she moved to the UK and he started a PhD in theoretical neuroscience at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. The time spent in the PhD was very difficult for a number of reasons. Some of these struggles included financial difficulties during his studies, insecurities about his intellect relative to other people, not being able to join his family in Chile amid health problems while he was in the UK, and, perhaps hardest of all, the two-body problem with his wife at the time, which, unfortunately, they didn't manage to solve. Some of these issues caused, sometimes brought on by himself, periods of non-productive workaholic states, anxiety, and severe depression, to the point where he was completely detached from a normal life. Some other side failures include his first research talk, which was unanimously and objectively terrible, getting roasted and denied a collaboration by a PI because he wasn't smart enough, completely failing a PhD interview and not being able to publish his main PhD project. Fortunately, Rodrigo thinks free will does not exist, which makes him very grateful for the roll of the dice that has given him access to a loving family, friends and partners, and great mentors who shaped him and his living experience into something he learn from, enjoy and overcome (most of the time). In the case of the PhD experience in particular, this took the form of a great PhD advisor who just happened to be there, without him knowing it when he accepted the offer, and other PhD students, from whom Rodrigo took inspiration, reminding him why he was doing research and why he wants to stay in academia. Rodrigo is currently doing a postdoc at Princeton, which he is enjoying very much, especially a new aspect of it: mentoring and working alongside new students. Because of this, and some other reasons, he is planning, although open to opportunities ;), to go back to Chile and become a professor there, where he hopes to mentor and support the next generation of Chilean scientists, and perhaps help improve the public's perception of science, pushing back against the anti-scientific discourse that, unfortunately, is not a threat only in Chile but in other places too. He is basically clueless about what he is doing or where it's going, yet despite this (and despite the dystopian direction that history is taking), Rodrigo is excited about the future. He is eager to share some of this in the Growing Up in Science event, and hopes that this can be useful to someone in the audience. More importantly, if you read all the way here, he appreciates the time you took to do so. Also, if you think discussing some of this with Rodrigo would help you, he would be happy to chat with you.