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About |
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Our research fluctuates a bit based on what interests us and the strengths of our lab members. We invite you to contact us with collaboration ideas. We tend to focus on Bayesian and data analysis methods and we want to help in the production of data.
We are data scientists with an interest in understanding the brain. Making sense of data is possibly the biggest problem in Neuroscience. We build algorithms to analyze data. We also use theory as well as computational and neural modeling to understand how information is processed in the nervous system, explaining data obtained in collaboration with electrophysiologists and in psychophysical experiments. Lastly, we constrain and develop new technologies aimed at obtaining data about brains.
Our conceptual work in the Bayesian Behavior Lab addresses information processing in the nervous system from two angles: (1) By analyzing and explaining electrophysiological data, we study what neurons do. (2) By analyzing and explaining human behavior, we study what all these neurons do together. Much of our work looks at these questions from a normative viewpoint, asking what problems the nervous system should be solving. This often means taking a Bayesian approach. Bayesian decision theory is the systematic way of calculating how the nervous system may make good decisions in the presence of uncertainty.
We've pursued projects that involve handshake greetings, human movement, cell-phone related parkinson's research, competitions at Kaggle, meta-science analysis, data sharing initiatives, and recording from all neurons in a mouse.
Our research group is remarkably interdisciplinary. Our interests span statistics, physics, biology, applied mathematics, molecular biology, metascience, cognitive science, and many other disciplines. Visit our people page to see more information on each person who works in the lab (publications, contact information, photos).
For PDFs of our work, visit our publications page. Feel free to issue on Github if links don't work or obsolete.
Here are some cool people in fields that interest us. note: This list is in no way complete. We have a lot of collaborators -- if you've collaborated with us and want a link here, let us know!
Northwestern University:
- Jay Gottfried - Dept of Neurology
- Lee Miller - Depts of Physiology and BME
- Mark Segraves - Depts of Neurobiology and Physiology
- Sara Solla - Depts of Physiology and Physics
- Matt Tresch - Depts of Physiology and BME
External:
- Scott Grafton - UCSB
- Nicho Hatsopoulos - University of Chicago
- Peter Strick - University of Pittsburgh
- Mriganka Sur - MIT
- Christine Thomas - University of Miami
- Rob Turner - University of Pittsburgh
Organization:
- Northwestern University
- RIC: Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
- SMPP: Sensory Motor Performance Program
- Department of Physiology
- Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
- Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Math
- Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program