Melika Payvand is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, where she leads the Emerging Intelligent Substrates lab. She received mer MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2012 and 2016, respectively.

Her research focuses on understanding natural intelligence and implementing its organizing principles in silico to develop efficient artificial intelligence (AI) systems. She is particularly fascinated by how various structures in the brain, from micro to macro scale, give rise to function. This fascination drives her work on hierarchical structures and their potential to reduce the cost of training and operating AI systems. Specifically, she explores novel memory technologies, such as memristive devices, which change their structure based on the history of inputs and are promising candidates for developing «emergent» intelligent systems.

Melika Payvand is honored to have received the prestigious 2023 Swiss National Science Foundation Starting Grant. Additionally, she is an active member of the neuromorphic community. She has co-coordinated the European project NEUROTECH , co-chaired the International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems (ICONS), and co-organized the scientific program of the Capocaccia Neuromorphic Intelligence workshop from 2019 to 2023. She is also the chair-elect of the Neural Systems and Applications of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.