William Chapman Neuromorphic Computing
Neuromorphic & cognitive computing

I research computation through dynamics to build neurally inspired artificial intelligence.

Computational neuroscience, dynamical systems, electrical engineering and machine learning — used together to find mechanisms of coordinated computation, and to put them in hardware.

Rebound element → column → spatial code
One release from inhibition, carried from device to code · illustration, not data

I am a senior member of technical staff in Neuromorphic Computing at Sandia National Laboratories, where I lead projects on physics-based computation in emerging hardware, graph neural networks for scientific computing, and physics-informed neural networks. As principal investigator I direct a portfolio of roughly $4M across four grants, and I lead cross-functional teams of four to nine researchers.

My work is grounded in the study and functional abstraction of biological circuits. During my PhD in Computational Neuroscience at Boston University with Michael Hasselmo, I built models of neocortical microcircuits that learn from temporal error — self-supervised prediction rather than reconstruction. Before that I was a neural modeler at eCortex and a research software engineer at the Conte Center for Systems Neuroscience.

Recent

Updated Aug 2026
2026-07

Co-instructing Neuromorphic Computing at the University of New Mexico this autumn.

2026-03

Became a senior member of technical staff in Neuromorphic Computing at Sandia, after three years as a postdoctoral appointee.

2026-03

Graph Reservoir Networks for Prediction of Spatiotemporal Systems presented at NICE 2026; patent application 19/550,784 filed in February.

2026-02

Invited talk at Georgia Tech — “Intracellular dynamics for mixed signal neuromorphic computation.”

2026-01

Three invited talks in January: the Energy Consequences of Information workshop in Santa Fe, Flagship Pioneering in Boston, and GreatSky.ai in Boulder.

2025-07

Received Sandia’s Distinguished Mentorship Award for work with graduate students.

Selected work

All 23 papers →
01

Lateral Divisive Inhibition for Dynamic Gain Control

‡ G. W. Chapman, J. A. Boyle, N. Gilbert, T. P. Xiao, S. Agarwal, F. S. Chance

ICONS 2025 PDF ↗
02

Learned Adaptive Properties for Mitigation of Weight Perturbations in Embedded Spiking Networks

‡ S. Luca, T. P. Xiao, F. S. Chance, S. Agarwal, C. Teeter, G. W. Chapman

Frontiers in Neuroscience 2026 PDF ↗
03

Predictive Learning by a Burst-Dependent Learning Rule

G. W. Chapman, M. E. Hasselmo

Neurobiol. Learn. Mem. 2023 PDF ↗
Working on dynamics, devices, or both?

I read every email about neuromorphic hardware, predictive learning, or mentorship.

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