Benjamin D. Pedigo

I am a Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, focused on data science techniques for helping to understand nanoscale connectomes.

I did my PhD in the Deparment of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Joshua Vogelstein and Carey Priebe in the NeuroData lab. My thesis developed statistical and computational techniques for analyzing connectome data, and applied them to the the connectome of an insect brain.

I am also a developer of graspologic, an open-source Python package for doing statistical analyses of network data which we now co-develop with Microsoft Research. I am broadly interested in making data analysis techniques in neuroscience more accessible through open-source software.

About me

I grew up in Lake Forest Park, WA, just north of Seattle. I received a B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of Washington. There I worked in Dr. Chet Moritz’s lab, investigating whether optogenetic techniques could help with restoring motor function after spinal cord injuries. I also spent a summer as an intern at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, working on a project to collect a nanoscale connectome from a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex. During my PhD, I was an intern with Team Essex at Microsoft Research, exploring techniques for graph and sequence embeddings and visualization.

Outside of research, I enjoy birdwatching, biking, and backpacking.