Adam Charles joined the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor in July 2020. In this interview, Charles discusses his research developing mathematical models and algorithms to understand the brain, his goals for the future, and career advice for students.

What made you pursue a career in engineering?

I always loved mathematics—in part because I was pretty lousy at memorizing and in math I could memorize the fewest rules and work out the rest as needed. The one caveat was that I wanted the math to tie to something tangible. In my early physics classes, I really loved how mathematics provided a very concise and clear way to express seemingly complex systems. I became interested in engineering, and eventually I found my home with signal processing and data science for neuroscience.

Why did you choose Johns Hopkins BME? What are you looking forward to most?

The community! My work lives in an emerging intersection of data science, imaging, and neuroscience. JHU has all three in abundance: the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS), the Center for Imaging Science (CIS), and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute. With these centers, and BME as my home, many opportunities are available for someone like myself to collaborate broadly in bridging these areas.

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