Kira Düsterwald

Kira Düsterwald is a PhD candidate at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, and a practising medical doctor in the UK’s NHS. Her research focuses on theoretical models of perceptual inference and statistical learning, with application to autism.

She is also interested in optimal transport and its use for understanding neural representations, via her time as a visiting research scholar at the Machine Learning and Data Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Kira did her medical training, MSc (neuroscience) and undergraduate mathematics at the University of Cape Town, where she worked on biophysical models of neuronal chloride homeostasis.

She is the CEO of Amathambo AI, which she co-founded at the 2022 Deep Learning Indaba. Amathambo AI is a healthtech company that uses machine learning to optimise African healthcare.