Hello! I'm a Research Scientist working on AI at Pioneering Intelligence, the AI group within Flagship Pioneering. My research focuses on how systems can learn and generalize with structure, a question I've explored both in computational neuroscience and in models of molecular systems.
I trained as a cognitive scientist, receiving my PhD from Brown University with Michael J. Frank and doing a postdoc at Harvard with Sam Gershman in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. My PhD work applied nonparametric Bayesian methods to study compositional structure in reinforcement learning. My postdoc produced Structured Event Memory, a neurosymbolic generative model combining LSTMs with Bayesian nonparametric inference to model how humans parse and remember events.
I split my time between Brooklyn and Cambridge. I enjoy surfing, reading and hanging out with friends and family. In that picture of me playing chess, I am losing badly.
- AI for molecular systems
- Physics-constrained reasoning
- Reinforcement learning and generative models
Publications
- Migliorini G, Rontogiannis A, Guitchounts G, Franklin, N. T., Elaldi A, Viessmann O (2025): Mechanistic Interpretability from Pair Representations In Protein Co-Folding. Learning for Structural Biology Workshop
- Ko J., Rontogiannis A., Ban Y.E.A., Elaldi A., Franklin, N. T.†, (2025) Sequence Sampling for Diverse Protein Design. Machine Learning for Structural Biology Workshop (†senior author)
- Liu, A., Elaldi, A., Franklin, N. T., Russell, N., Atwal, G. S., Ban, Y. E. A., Viessmann, O. (2025). Flash Invariant Point Attention. NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight).
- Beukers, A. O., Collin, S. H., Kempner, R. P., Franklin, N. T., Gershman, S. J., & Norman, K. A. (2024). Blocked training facilitates learning of multiple schemas. Communications Psychology.
- Franklin N.T., & Frank, M. J. (2020). Generalizing to generalize: humans flexibly switch between compositional and conjunctive structures during reinforcement learning. PLoS Computational Biology.
- Franklin N.T., Norman K.A., Ranganath C., Zacks J.M., Gershman S.J. (2020). Structured event memory: a neuro-symbolic model of event cognition. Psychological Review.
- Schulz E.*, Franklin N.T.*, Gershman S.J. (2020). Finding structure in multi-armed bandits. Cognitive Psychology. (* equal contribution)
- Franklin N.T., & Frank, M. J. (2018). Compositional clustering in task structure learning. PLoS Computational Biology.
- Franklin N.T., & Frank, M. J. (2015). A cholinergic feedback circuit to regulate striatal population uncertainty and optimize reinforcement learning. eLife.
- Teslovich, T., Mulder, M., Franklin N.T., Ruberry, E. J., Millner, A., Somerville, L. H., Simen, P., Durston, S. & Casey, B. J. (2014). Adolescents let sufficient evidence accumulate before making a decision when large incentives are at stake. Developmental Science.
- Casey, B. J., Somerville, L. H., Gotlib, I. H., Ayduk, O., Franklin N.T., Askren, M. K., Jonides J., Berman M. G., Wilson N. L., Teslovich T., & Glover, G (2011). Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.