about

Katie Begany, PhD

I’m a neuroscientist and systems thinker working at the intersection of brain science, data, and artificial intelligence. My formal training spans philosophy and cognitive science (BA, Case Western Reserve University) and neuroscience (PhD, UC Berkeley). I’m drawn to large, complex systems — like the brain — and to understanding how systems function in harmony, adapt under pressure, or unravel into dysfunction.

Alongside my “official” work in neuroscience and generative AI, I’ve always been an armchair philosopher, curious about the deeper assumptions shaping our technologies and institutions. I’m interested in how meaning gets reduced to metrics (and what’s lost in translation), how systems quietly shape what we experience as real, and how intelligence—human or artificial—is often misunderstood when forced into narrow frames.

Frame Shift is an extension of that ongoing inquiry. It’s a space for thinking across boundaries: between science and lived experience, data and meaning, precision and depth. It’s an invitation to question the frames we inherit and to notice what emerges when we look at them differently.

I’m also a parent, a nature-lover, and a person who resists tidy categories — less interested in tidy conclusions than in the processes and relationships that give rise to them.