Indian-Origin Neuroscientist Akshay Jagadeesh Joins OpenAI As Researcher: "Thrilled To Share..."

Indian-origin researcher Akshay Jagadeesh has joined OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, as a research resident. He has nearly a decade of experience studying the human brain, with a PhD in Computational Neuroscience and Psychology from Stanford University. In his role at OpenAI, he will focus on enhancing safety research and exploring the potential of artificial intelligence to drive advancements in healthcare and medicine. Mr Jagadeesh shared the news on social media, expressing his enthusiasm for this new chapter in his career.

"I'm thrilled to share that I've joined @OpenAI as a research resident, focusing on safety research and AI for health. After nearly 10 years studying the brain, I'm excited for this next chapter building AGI to accelerate medical progress and scientific research," he wrote on X.

See the tweet here:

I'm thrilled to share that I've joined @OpenAI as a research resident, focusing on safety research and AI for health.

After nearly 10 years studying the brain, I'm excited for this next chapter building AGI to accelerate medical progress and scientific research! #feeltheagi

— Akshay Jagadeesh (@akjags) September 7, 2025

Who is Akshay Jagadeesh?

Akshay Jagadeesh is a computational neuroscientist of Indian origin, renowned for his work at the intersection of neurobiology, machine learning, and cognitive science. Currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, he has made significant contributions to understanding human visual perception and its parallels with artificial neural networks. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Jagadeesh earned his PhD from Stanford University, focusing on how attention enhances visual perception and the neural representation of textures. His research explores how the brain processes sensory inputs to guide behaviour, often comparing biological and artificial neural systems.

He has also worked as a research assistant at prestigious institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, and Humboldt University in Berlin.

At OpenAI, he is expected to leverage his expertise in computational neuroscience to advance AI models, bridging insights from human cognition to enhance machine learning systems. His work at Harvard, under Dr. Margaret Livingstone, has included studies on visual neural representations and texture biases in primate and artificial neural networks, published in prestigious venues like PNAS and ICLR. These findings could inform OpenAI's efforts to develop more biologically plausible AI models.

In the About section of his LinkedIn profile, he elaborated on his role and wrote, "I am currently a Researcher at OpenAI, where I focus on two goals: advancing safety research to ensure artificial intelligence systems are reliable and aligned, and exploring how AI can accelerate progress in health and medicine. I am especially motivated by the opportunity to translate my background in neuroscience and modelling into building AI tools that both deepen scientific discovery and contribute to human well-being."