Demba Ba serves as Gordon McKay Professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he directs the CRISP group. With an eye towards a future where humans and AI can safely co-create in the physical world, he is fascinated by mechanistic interpretability, namely to elucidate how biological (i.e. the brain) artificial systems represent information, compute, and accomplish tasks. He is also building the future of transparent, trustworthy AI that "thinks" like humans, for businesses, personal growth and safety.

He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science with a minor in mathematics from MIT. In 2016, he received a Research Fellowship in Neuroscience from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2021, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Roslyn Abramson award for outstanding undergraduate teaching. In 2022, he co-authored a report with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on accelerating behavioral science through ontology development and use.