Michael Connell has a Master's degree from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a Master's degree from Harvard in Education. At MIT he studied Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and he first became interested in self-organizing systems while working with Rodney Brooks in the MIT Mobile Robot Lab. Later, exposure to computational neuroscience caused him to shift his focus from robot circuits to human brains, with an eye toward both fundamental research on cognition and real-world applications to education grounded in that research. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, working mainly in the area of Mind, Brain, and Education (within the Human Development and Psychology department). His research interests involve understanding how mathematical models of the brain and mind (including artificial neural network models and dynamical systems models) can serve as vehicles for applying neuroscience findings to educational issues in systematic and principled ways (e.g., by explicitly revealing how the constraints and self-organizing learning processes of the brain interact with the inherent structure of a knowledge domain to produce the kinds of learning trajectories and knowledge representations that we observe in empirical studies of individual learners).