David Dalrymple

David A. Dalrymple is an American computer scientist and neuroscientist, and is also known as Davidad (a composite of his first name and other initials). He is the youngest person to ever attend graduate school at MIT, and is a visiting scientist at the neurobiology lab of MIT professor Edward Boyden.

At age eight, Dalrymple was invited by Neil Gershenfeld to a White House event to demonstrate a device he had built using Lego Mindstorms. At age nine, he joined Ray Kurzweil as a speaker at TED, and at age 14, he was the youngest person ever to enroll in an MIT graduate program.In 2005, he obtained Bachelor of Science degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics at age 13 from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.He receiveda Master of Science degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab with a 5.0 GPA at age 16 and was a student at Singularity University in 2010. He was a graduate student in the Harvard Biophysics PhD program, studying worm C. elegans neurobiology and advanced microscopy, but dropped out.

Dalrymple has worked at the MIT Media Lab Center for Bits and Atoms on new programming paradigms such as "Reconfigurable asynchronous logic automata: (RALA)".Early entrepreneurial efforts included selling photography and fractal art, fundraising for multiple sclerosis charity, and portable camera-like devices to “read” street signs and menus aloud into headphones (to assist visually impaired individuals).

In 2012, Dalrymple obtained a research grant from the Thiel Foundation to establish new approaches to brain analysis and control. He contributed to the OpenWorm project, which seeks to model the brains of the nematode C. elegans, then started NemaLoad (his own brain modeling project) to gather more neural data.

He works for Twitter in Silicon Valley as a software engineer as of May, 2014.

On November 30, 2011, Dalrymple lectured in Marvin Minsky's MIT class "Society of Mind" on the topic of "Mind vs. Brain: Confessions of a Defector". He has written essays for Edge.org every year since 2007.