Dmitri “Mitya” Chklovskii is Group Leader for Neuroscience at the Simons Center for Data Analysis and Research Associate Professor at NYU Medical Center. His goal is to understand the brain by analyzing experimental data and constructing the theory of neural computation. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He switched from physics to neuroscience at the Salk Institute and founded the first theoretical neuroscience group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1999, where he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor. From 2007 to 2014 he was a Group Leader at Janelia Farm where he led a team that assembled the largest-ever connectome.