Erin Grant
Appointment
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
CIFAR Global Scholars 2026-2028
Learning in Machines & Brains
Pan-Canadian AI Strategy
Connect
About
Erin Grant is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of Psychology and Computing Science at the University of Alberta, and a Fellow at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Grant’s research bridges cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence to understand how biological and artificial intelligence systems build internal representations of the world that support perception, cognition and action. Learning and generalization are among the defining capacities of intelligent systems, shared across humans, other animals and machines. Grant aims to identify how these simple computational principles enable complex abilities like vision, language, decision-making and planning, and to apply these insights to advance both our understanding of biological intelligence and the development of more robust and transparent artificial intelligence systems.
Awards
- Rising Star of Neuroscience, The Transmitter, 2025
- Postgraduate Scholarship, Doctoral, NSERC, 2020
Relevant Publications
- Braun, L., Grant, E., & Saxe, A. M. (2025). Not all solutions are created equal: An analytical dissociation of functional and representational similarity in deep linear neural networks. Proceedings of 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning.
- Lufkin, L., Saxe, A., & Grant, E. (2024). Nonlinear dynamics of localization in neural receptive fields. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37, 25938–25960.
- Grant, E., Finn, C., Levine, S., Darrell, T., & Griffiths, T. (2018). Recasting gradient-based meta-learning as hierarchical bayes. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Representations.