Saul Kato, PhD

Saul founded the Foundations of Cognition Laboratory within the Weill Institute of Neurosciences to understand how holistic brain function emerges, via neural network dynamics, from the brain's biological architecture, and how this function breaks down in disease. He brings to this effort a background in neurobiology, physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering.

After studying many-body quantum mechanics with Bob Laughlin at Stanford, Saul spent a decade as an engineer and tech entrepreneur; he founded, built, and sold two technology companies, before returning to basic science.

In 1996 he founded Sven Technologies, which developed 3D graphics rendering and design software and run-time libraries. Sven Tech's software was based on algorithms invented by Saul: adaptive texture mapping (ATM), multi-resolution geometry (MRG), and curved surface rendering (CSR). These technologies are in use today in modern 3D authoring pipelines and real-time game and VR rendering engines. Sven Tech was acquired by Spatial - Dassault Systemes, one of the largest computer-aided design (CAD) companies.

In 2000, he co-founded WideRay Corp, which pioneered the idea of local ad-hoc wireless content delivery. WideRay created networking protocols, designed and manufactured new types of hardware devices -- intelligent access and mobile caching servers, and designed end-user software for many mobile operating systems. It built a network of several thousand local content delivery points in fifteen countries. WideRay was funded by Sequoia Capital and Enterprise Venture Partners. In 2006, WideRay became Qwikker and was acquired by Dimensional Associates.

After 10 years as a tech entrepreneur, Saul returned to academia to attack the grand problem of understanding biological cognition. His PhD awarded in 2013 was an experimental and computational study of the input-output processing properties of C. elegans neurons, jointly advised by Larry Abbott at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University and Cori Bargmann at Rockefeller University. Saul then did his postdoc from 2013-2016 as an EMBO Long-Term Fellow in Manuel Zimmer's lab at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria, producing the one of the earliest experimental discoveries in 2015 in C. elegans, of how low-dimensional manifolds within brain-wide dynamics organize behavior. Since then, low-dimensional manifolds have been found to be a universal architectural feature of cognition and behavior across all animal brains.

Saul joined the neuroscience faculty of UCSF in 2016 and was tenured in 2021.

In 2017, Saul co-founded Herophilus, the pioneer in high-throughput brain organoid technology for disease research and drug discovery founded in 2016, and was acting CEO from 2021 to 2023, until the company's acquisition by Roche in 2023.