About

Amida Anand is a neurotechnology researcher working at the intersection of theoretical physics and cognitive neuroscience — on the question of how minds learn.

Her MRes thesis at Imperial College London, "A Tale of Two Criticalities: How the Brain Learns through the Lens of Criticality," applied renormalisation group methods and spin glass theory to the critical behaviour underlying biological learning. She graduated with Distinction in 2025.

Before Imperial she read Physics with Biophysics at King's College London, graduating First Class with the highest grade in Advanced Biophysics. She has been a Research Assistant at King's Engineering (wireless molecular communication, with Dr Yansha Deng) and a research intern at the University of Cambridge's Department of Psychology (visual working memory, with Dr Paul Bays). She is a co-author on two peer-reviewed publications in 2025, in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience and with Springer.

Beyond research, she mentors students whose experiments fly to the International Space Station through ISSET (in partnership with NASA, ESA, and the University of Oxford), founded Space Medicine at KCL Space, and has organised national space conferences. She is the founder of the AMIDA Institute.

Beyond the lab

Amida is a published creative writer (Crossword's Young Storytellers; a Top-20 finalist in an international story-writing competition), photographer, and graphic designer, with writing for Imperial Bioscience Reviews and KCL Roar News. Outside work: scuba diving, dance, swimming, rafting, and camping — the same curiosity, carried into the world.