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My name is Jean-Paul Noel and I am currently a K99/R00 Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Neural Science at New York University (NYU). I work with Dr. Dora Angelaki. I am also part of the International Brain Lab (IBL).

Prior to NYU, I obtained my Ph.D. in Neuroscience (September 2018) at Vanderbilt University working with Dr. Mark Wallace at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. Before my Ph.D., I was a Fulbright Scholar at the Swiss National Institute for Technology (EPFL), working with Dr. Olaf Blanke and Dr. Andrea Serino.

In addition to academia, I spent some time in industry, interning at Oculus Research (now Facebook Reality Labs) and working with Dr. Max Di Luca.

My research interests revolve around questions regarding causal inference, multisensory integration and  probabilistic coding, both in health and disease (primarily Autism). I aim at understanding how we use sensory evidence to build internal models, both of the world around us and of ourselves within it. To tackle these questions, I employ psychophysics, virtual reality, neural network modeling, Bayesian causal inference modeling, human electrophysiology (EEG and ECOG) and invasive neurophysiology (single-unit recordings) techniques. For me “understanding” means bridging across levels of description, and thus I am particularly interested in using a variety of techniques to tackle a specific (hopefully theoretically motivated) question.

My work has been supported both by the National Science Foundation (NSF GRF) and the National Institutes of Health (NRSA, K99/R00). In 2016 I was awarded the Early Graduate Student Researcher of the Year by part of the American Psychological Association (APA). In 2019 I was awarded the Glushko Dissertation Prize by the Society for Cognitive Science.

A few recent publications:

Noel J-P, Balzani E, Avila E, Lakshminarasimhan KJ, Bruni S, Alefantis P, Savin C, Angelaki DE. (2022). Coding of latent variables in sensory, parietal, and frontal cortices during closed-loop virtual navigation. Elife, 25;11:e80280.
 
Noel J-P, Shivkumar S, Dokka K, Haefner RM, Angelaki DE. (2022). Aberrant causal inference and presence of a compensatory mechanism in autism spectrum disorder. Elife, 17;11:e71866. 

Noel, J-P, Angelaki, D.E. (2022). Human, systems, and computational neurosciences of the self in motion. Annual Review in Psychology; 4, 73:103-129

Noel, J-P, Zhang, L.Q., Stocker, A.A., Angelaki, D.E (2021). Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder have altered visual encoding capacity. PloS Biology, 19 (5), e 3001215

Noel, J-P, Lakshminarasimhan, K.J., Angelaki, D. E. (2020). Increased uncertainty but intact integration during visual navigation in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, May 19;117(20):11158-11166

 

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