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Ila Fiete and her group examine the mechanisms that underlie memory, integration, inference, and learning in the brain and in deep networks. They use quantitative data analysis as well as theoretical and computational modeling techniques to address mechanistic and function-related questions about the brain. In groundbreaking research on grid cells, the neurons that help all mammals to navigate through space, Fiete and her collaborators have supplied the theoretical mechanisms for their activity and stabilization, for their developmental emergence, and for their role in function in spatial memory, episodic memory, and cognitive mapping. For this work, she won the 2022 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience. She earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in physics at Harvard University. Ila is a professor in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative and Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center.