Ashok Litwin Kumar

Ashok Litwin Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. His research integrates systems and computational neuroscience, focusing on connectome-constrained recurrent neural networks, striatal dopamine signaling in reinforcement learning, and sensorimotor pathway identification in whole-brain connectomes. Recent work published in *Nature* reveals that striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separate from value, while studies in *Nature Neuroscience* and *Physical Review X* model neural activity and nonlinear dynamics in recurrent networks. Kumar also investigates experience-dependent reorganization of inhibitory synaptic connectivity and dopaminergic punishment in *Drosophila*. He received the 2025 NSF CAREER Award for modeling sensorimotor pathways, supporting his interdisciplinary approach spanning insect neurophysiology, animal cognition, and developmental biology.