Brenden Lake will join Princeton's Departments of Psychology and Computer Science from New York University, where he is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Data Science. Lake earned a B.S. and M.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Moore-Sloan Data Science.

Lake's research seeks the ingredients of intelligence using advances in machine intelligence to better understand human intelligence, and uses insights from human intelligence to develop more fruitful kinds of machine intelligence. In one line of work, Lake focuses on the human abilities to learn new concepts from just a few examples, learn by asking questions, learn by generating new goals, and learn by producing novel combinations of known components. Lake's work has revealed key cognitive ingredients and inductive biases that people use but are missing in contemporary machine learning.