Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Research Area: neuroscience; social behavior; affect and emotion; innate behavior; neural imaging; data-driven machine learning;AI for neuroscience;

Award Citation:The AYSF Committee acknowledges Dr. Aditya Nair's pioneering discovery of line attractor dynamics encoding affective states in the hypothalamus, which provides the first causal evidence linking neural circuit dynamics to emotional persistence in mammals. AYSF would like to support his continued exploration of how affective and cognitive variables interact during social behavior through the integration of AI-driven modeling, large-scale neural recording, and causal perturbation.

Bio: Aditya Nair is the Nanyang Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and AI at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, and a Principal Scientist at A*STAR’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. His research investigates how the brain generates affective states and the computations underlying social intelligence, as well as whether related computational principles emerge in artificial agents. His lab combines large-scale neural recordings, quantitative behavioral analysis, causal circuit perturbations, and data-driven dynamical systems modeling to uncover the population dynamics that generate and maintain internal states. His work has revealed neural attractor dynamics that encode the persistence and escalation of aggression and reproductive drive, providing mechanistic insights into how emotion-related states are represented in the brain. He received his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech under the supervision of David J. Anderson in 2024. His research has been recognized with the Science Prize for AI-Accelerated Research from AAAS, the Gruber International Research Prize from the Society for Neuroscience, and the NIH NeuroAI Early Career Award. His broader goal is to build a bidirectional bridge between neural computation and AI to understand adaptive and impaired social and affective behavior.

Personal Web: https://www.nairlab.science/