Erica received a B.S. in Mathematics from Davidson College where she was awarded the Thomas S. Smith scholarship for postgraduate studies abroad. Thanks to the support of the Smith Scholarship she received an M.S.c. in Machine Learning with distinction from University College London. Before coming to Columbia she worked at MIT as a research technician in Josh McDermott's computational audition lab where she built and analyzed deep neural network models of human auditory cortex. As a PhD candidate, jointly advised by Richard Axel and Larry Abbott, she is interested in the computational principles underlying cuttlefish camouflage behavior. Her work is supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship. For the fall of 2022 she is interning at Meta Reality labs in Redmond, WA.
