Nov 2020 – Had a great time attending, presenting, and debating at the Junior Scientists Workshop on Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience hosted (unfortunately, virtually) by Janelia! It was great to take a week to make new friends, think about drosophila, moths, different birds, and insects. Neuroscience is so much broader than sometimes we remember. Big thank you to all the superb faculty at Janelia for being so kind, encouraging and open.
May 2020 – COVID19 means we are all working remotely and life is not normal at the moment. Important to celebrate the little successes, happy to share my first publication from my post-doc with Dora Angelaki (Noel et al., 2020, PNAS)
January 2020 – Had a great time visiting the lab of Albert Powers to talk about psychiatric disorders and anomalies in Bayesian computations! Al is an incredible scientist and an even better person!
September 2019 – Very excited about our most recent publication (Noel et al.) in the Journal of Neuroscience! In it, for the first time we directly contrast in a single neuron dataset the two most prevalent theories of consciousness. The Templeton Foundation just funded a large collaboration to do the same.
September 2019 – Another IBL get together! This time in NYC and without adults! In all seriousness, trying to get some real work done at the IBL bootcamp. Check out this great write-up by Berk Gercek “Herding cats for effective neuroscience collaboration across the continents“
August 2019 – Fun trip to Oslo to give a talk at “Mapping the Self” (ICDL-EPIROB). Great to spend time with Matej Hoffmann, Tamar Makin, Rory Buffachi, Daniela Corbetta, and Jeff Lockman among others!
July 2019 – Incredibly honored to have received the Glushko Dissertation Prize in Cognitive Science. You can find my talk at the CogSci meeting here.
May 2019 – Another successful IBL meeting in Paris!
March 2019 – Visited Alan Stocker’s Lab at UPenn. Had a great time and can’t wait to start collaborating on a couple projects!
February 24 – March 6th, 2019 – Back in Europe for an IBL Post-Doc+ Summit at Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, as well as my first Cosyne Meeting!
December 4-6th, 2018 – Visited the Cortex Lab at UCL for a NeuroPixel mini-course. Thanks for sharing all your expertise and hosting us in London!
November 9, 2018 – Incredibly thankful to the Swiss Embassy in the US for hosting me and other Fulbright Scholars in their alumni event. Humbled by the opportunity to give a talk about the research I did at EPFL.
October 25, 2018 – New paper with Majed Samad and Massimiliano Di Luca, “Peri-Personal Space as a prior in coupling visuo-proprioceptive signals”. In this paper we argue that the peri-personal space is a prior developed over evolutionary and developmental history; it happens to be that in our physical world when objects are seen near one’s body, there is a higher chance that these will come in contact (one will feel touch) with the body. Thus, we develop a prior for visuo-proprioceptive (tactile) coupling. We then demonstrate that visual and proprioceptive reaches are biased toward one another, and conform with a Bayes optimal strategy (causal inference). Additionally we show that this prior is proximity dependent, and thus a model not taking into account proximity does not perform as well.
October 22, 2018 – Attended the “Learning Body Models: Humans, Brains, and Robots” workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, Netherlands. Thank you Dr. Matej Hoffmann for organizing such a wonderful conference and giving us all the possibility to meet with old friends and make new ones.
October 1, 2018 – Began my post-doctoral fellowship working at NYU in Dora Angelaki‘s new lab. Excited to collaborate with new people and learn new techniques!
September 7, 2018 – New paper with Andrea Serino and Mark Wallace! “Increased Neural Strength and Reliability to Audiovisual Stimuli at the Boundary of Peripersonal Space” in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. In this paper we present participants with auditory, visual, or audio-visual stimuli both in near and far space (also near to their PPS boundary and far from it) while we record high-density EEG. The main motivation was to see whether processing of non-tactile stimuli would be modulated as a function of distance (just as tactile stimuli are). Interestingly, instead of seeing greater multisensory responses in near space (as one would expect in PPS with tactile stimuli), we see greater responses (also more reliable ones) at the boundary of PPS! Will post the paper in the Publications tab once the final version of the paper is out.
August 22, 2018 – Dissertation defended! Officially a Ph.D.!
Shout out to Nathan van der Stoep for creating this incredible drawing which I was able to use as the cover for my dissertation.
July 30, 2018 – Attended the Summer School in Computational Sensorimotor Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, MN. Huge thank you to Gunnar Blohm, Paul Schrater, and Konrad Kording for putting together an exceptional course. Majed Samad, Nathanael Larigaldie, Gabor Lengyel, Edoardo Balzani, and I also won the 2-week long research project and will be presenting our research at the Advances in Motor Learning & Motor Control SFN-satellite this November!
July 22, 2018 – Attended the Gordon Conference on Neurobiology in Newry, ME. Great to meet a ton of new friends!
June 14, 2018 – Attended the International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF) in Toronto, Canada. What an awesome conference and city!