Felipe Parodi

I study how primate brains encode social intelligence and how these principles can inform artificial ones. I'm co-advised by Konrad Kording and Michael Platt.

My research combines neuroscience, machine learning, and animal behavior to model natural social behavior from multiple data streams, including neural, video, and audio data.

I went to college at the University of Miami, where I studied Neuroscience and Economics. I then briefly worked as a Psychometrician before grad school.

Research

Primate neuroethology: a new synthesis
Why we should study primate intelligence in more natural conditions.

↳ In the news: Big Think, Scientific American, Phys.org, Nature News, Penn Today
PrimateFace
A machine learning resource for cross-species primate facial analysis.
awesome-computational-primatology
A curated community resource at the intersection of ML and primatology.

View all publications

News

Mar 2026 📝 Our work on register tokens in vision transformers accepted to the How Do Vision Models Work? (HOW) workshop at CVPR 2026!
Feb 2026 🎉 Designated a Penn AI Fellow for 2026!
Dec 2025 🎉 Awarded Gemini Academic Program credits to support our AI for behavior modeling work.
Dec 2025 🗞️ Our synthesis on primate neuroethology was featured in Big Think!
Dec 2025 Gave a guest lecture on (AI for) primatology at Marc Schmidt & Yun Ding’s Animal Behavior course at UPenn. Slides here.

Oct 2025 PrimateFace accepted to NeurIPS AI for Animal Communication Workshop (oral) and Foundation Models for the Brain and Body Workshop (poster)!
Sep 2025 📝 Published Primate neuroethology: a new synthesis on why we should study primate behavior in real-world conditions.
Aug 2025 📝 Preprinted PrimateFace, a machine learning resource for cross-species primate facial analysis.
Jul 2025 📝 Preprinted our position piece on grounding intelligence research in movement modeling
May 2025 🧠 Held penultimate (?!) committee meeting for my PhD!
Dec 2024 🤖 Completed LLM evaluation internship at Google–YouTube.
Nov 2024 📈 Co-hosted an AI for Science workshop with Konrad Kording for motor control PhD students at University of Chicago.
Jul 2024 🤖 Attended the CIFAR DLRL Summer School at the Vector Institute in Toronto, Canada.
Jun 2024 📝 Published CVPR workshop paper on extending vision-language models for quantifying provider attention during neonatal resuscitation!
May 2024 📝 Published work on applying computer vision for dance quantification!
Apr 2024 📝 Nature publication on neural signatures of natural behavior in macaques!
Apr 2024 📈 Presented PrimateFace at Biological Anthropology Conference.
Mar 2024 📈 Presented PrimateFace at American Physical Society Spring meeting.
Feb 2024 📝 Published work on attention deficits linked to exploration during primate foraging!

Oct 2023 📝 Preprinted work on information gathering during human and monkey reward foraging.
Aug 2023 📈 Presented Quantifying grooming in paired macaques at Neuroethology: Behavior, Evolution, and Neurobiology Gordon Research Conference.
Jul 2023 📝 Preprinted work on LLM-assisted education tool to provide feedback on open-ended responses.
Jun 2023 📈 Presented PrimateFace at the CVPR CV4Animals workshop.
Mar 2023 📈 Presented Quantifying grooming in paired macaques at American Physical Society Spring meeting.
Jan 2023 Served as Teaching Assistant for the UG course Neuroethology (BIBB 233 @ Penn).
Dec 2022 🇶🇦🇦🇷 Completed short research stint in Qatar.
Sep 2022 Served as Teaching Assistant for the UG, MA course Statistics for Biologists (BIOL 2510 @ Penn).
Aug 2022 🎉 Awarded (but did not accept) the Travel Scholarship for the SACNAS National Diversity in STEM (NDiSTEM) Conference.
Jul 2022 📈 Presented Neural Basis of Macaque Social Repertoire at Neurobiology & Cognition Gordon Research Conference.
Jun 2022 🐒 Attended the Cajal Advanced Neuroscience Course on Quantitative Approaches to Behavior in Lisbon, Portugal!
May 2022 🎉 Passed my PhD candidacy exam!
May 2022 🎉 Awarded the Penn Jameson-Hurvich Travel Award.
Jan 2022 Served as Teaching Assistant for the UG and MA course Deep Learning for Data Science (CIS 522 @ Penn).
Sep 2021 Served as Teaching Assistant for the undergraduate (UG) course Statistics for Biologists (BIOL 446 @ Penn).
Sep 2021 🎉 Awarded the NRSA T32 NIDCD-NIH Training Grant in Audition and Communication (CANAC).
May 2021 🎉 Awarded the Generation Google – North America Scholarship!
May 2021 🗞️ Served as Computational Co-Chief for Brain in Briefs at Penn.
May 2021 🔬 Officially joined the Kording and Platt Labs as a co-supervised PhD Student.
May 2021 🧠 Completed rotation in the Kording Lab!
Mar 2021 🎉 Received Honorable Mention for the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.
Dec 2020 🐒 Completed rotation in the Platt Labs!
Oct 2020 📈 Presented Deep learning for primate non-human primate movement tracking at Neuromatch Conference.
Sep 2020 🎓 Started my PhD in Neuroscience as a William Fontaine Fellow at University of Pennsylvania!
Jul 2020 💻 Completed Neuromatch Academy’s Computational Neuroscience program.
Jun 2020 💻 Completed Stanford University’s Code in Place program.
May 2019 🎓 Received B.S. in Neuroscience, Economics from University of Miami!
May 2018 🎉 Inducted into the Iron Arrow Honor Society at University of Miami.