David A. Markowitz works at the intersection of neuroscience, biotechnology and computing. He is chief scientist at STR, an advanced technology research and development services company. He founded and leads a business unit that bridges biology with information science to accelerate discovery and deliver new capabilities. Since launching this effort in 2023, he has raised $30 million in public and private capital from customers including government (the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other Department of Defense and U.S. Intelligence Community elements) and philanthropy (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), and he has forged partnerships with a broad range of industry partners working in the health, agriculture, manufacturing and national security domains.
Previously, as an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity program manager, he led a more than $200 million portfolio of moonshot research programs that delivered transformative capabilities for national security, commercial industry and neuroscience. These include the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program, which generated and publicly released the first dense synaptic map of a cortical column and the largest-ever functionally annotated connectome, spanning 200,000 cells and 500 million synaptic connections across the mammalian visual cortex. The MICrONS Explorer site is now one of the most actively used resources in neuroscience.
Markowitz began his neuroscience career as a research technician in Eve Marder’s lab at Brandeis University. He received his Ph.D. in molecular biology and neuroscience from Princeton University as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow. His dissertation work, “Neural coding and computation using noisy oscillations,” was mentored by David Tank and John Hopfield. He completed his postdoctoral training in neural engineering and primate systems neuroscience with Bijan Pesaran at New York University. Prior to his career in science, Markowitz completed a degree in management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a concentration in information technology. He is a recipient of the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.
