Mehrdad Jazayeri, Ph.D

Principal Investigator

Postdocs

Sujaya Neupane, Ph.D

Sujay’s broad interest is in studying the computational principles underlying visual perception and cognition. He is specifically curious about the idea of an internal ‘cognitive map’ which is thought to be the basis of flexible behavior. He uses primate neurophysiology and computational modeling to study if and how such a map is interrogated during a cognitive task.

Sujay obtained his PhD from McGill University at the Montreal Neurological Institute where he studied the activity of visual neurons during eye-movement in primates.

Ruidong Chen, Ph.D

Ruidong is interested in how the brain uses hierarchical structures to make sense of the world and understand other minds. Ruidong obtained his PhD from Cornell University where he studied the role of basal ganglia in motor skill learning in songbirds.

Gabriel Stine, Ph.D

Gabriel is interested in the computational principles that underlie cognitive processing and in the biological principles that govern how computation is achieved by neural circuits. His research is focused on cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar interactions during learning. Gabriel received his PhD from Columbia University where he studied the neurobiology of perceptual decision making.

Aran Nayebi, Ph.D

Aran Nayebi is an ICoN Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, currently working with Robert Yang and Mehrdad Jazayeri. He completed his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Stanford University, co-advised by Dan Yamins and Surya Ganguli. His interests lie at the intersection of systems neuroscience and artificial intelligence, where he uses tools from deep learning and large-scale data analysis to reverse-engineer neural circuits. His long-term aim is to produce normative accounts of how the brain produces intelligent behavior and to build better artificial intelligence algorithms along the way.

Graduate Students

Mahdi Ramadan

Mahdi’s interests lie at the intersection of neural computation and cognition. He uses a combination of computational modeling and electrophysiology to study cognitive inference. Mahdi uses tasks demanding multiple rapid and hierarchically organized decisions to characterize hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning. Through his research, Mahdi hopes to gain a glimpse into how neural dynamics maintain and control internal models involving multiple possibilities. Mahdi is also interested in how inductive biases of objects and events constrain cognitive and neural models.

Setayesh Radkani

Setayesh is interested in using tools from psychology, cognitive neuroscience and machine learning to better understand our social and moral mind. She enjoys thinking about how we make sense of others’ actions, how we use this knowledge to navigate our social life and how we influence and change other minds.

Nicholas Watters

Nick is interested in the neural basis of sample-efficient learning and structured generalization. He believes that both of these are in large part consequences of compositional representations and factorized computation. He studies these phenomena in the domain of intuitive physics and is particularly interested in how the brain represents and reasons about multiple visual objects. Nick also has a long-standing interest in artificial intelligence and hopes that his research may ultimately contribute to the development of AI algorithms that show more human-like learning efficiency and behavioral flexibility.

Aída Piccato

Aída is interested in understanding the neural basis of memory strength – the precision and confidence with which we recall information. She is using experimental and computational techniques to identify the computations linking changes in neural activity over time to patterns of remembering and forgetting. She is interested in how these findings might inform models of memory that exhibit human-like flexibility and capacity.

Cheng Tang

Cheng is interested in understanding how the brain composes new knowledge from known knowledge. Using neurophysiological recording on non-human primates, Cheng aims to find out the neural basis of the ability to solve novel problems with different compositions of known operations. He is also interested in comparing neural network models with biological data to test hypotheses about the brain, and developing biologically inspired artificial intelligence.

Hokyung Sung

Hokyung is interested in how our brains “make sense” of the world. Concretely, he hopes to understand the neural basis of cognitive phenomena involving violations-of-expectation and their resolutions, with a focus on characterizing the computational principles that underlie explanations and explanation-seeking curiosity. More broadly, he is enthusiastic about investigating fundamental questions about the mind that lie at the intersection of philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience.

Jack Gabel

AI systems can trounce a grandmaster match after match, yet struggle to set up a chess board. Meanwhile, humans effortlessly manipulate a huge variety of objects. What is the neural basis of this behavioral flexibility? To answer this question, Jack aims to model the brain as subjects interact with physical scenes of objects.

Meghana Potta

Meghana’s research interests lie in understanding the neural basis of flexible behavior. She specifically focuses on how our brains infer context and use inferred contexts to create more detailed and accurate models of the world, which in turn guide adaptive behavior. Additionally, she is interested in studying the neural implementations of canonical neural computations and how they can result in cognitive deficits when they go awry. Meghana holds a Master’s degree from the Institute of Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich, where she explored and studied the use of linear time-invariant systems to better understand neural dynamics.

Other Research Personnel

Tara Sarma

MEng Student

Tara is an incoming MEng student interested in planning, attention, executive function, and the fundamental computations of the brain. She is also interested in how this relates to the production of language in the brain.

Lab Manager and Technical Associates

Adhara Martellini

Lab Manager

Adhara is broadly interested in the neural basis of cognition and the mechanisms that underlie complex and creative behaviors. She is also curious about innovative brain-interfacing technologies and about addressing questions at the intersection of philosophy of mind, computational modeling and neuroscience.

Neelima Valluru

Research Support Associate II

Michal De-Medonsa

Website Manager

Collaborators

Victor de Lafuente
National Autonomous University of Mexico

Ila Fiete
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stefano Fusi
Columbia University Medical Center

Valerio Mante
University of Zurich

Srdjan Ostojic
École de Neurosciences Paris

Maneesh Sahani
University College London

Rebecca Saxe
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Krishna Shenoy
Stanford University

David Sussillo
Stanford and Google AI

Josh Tenenbaum
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alumni

Postdoctoral Research Supervised (primary supervisor)
Hansem Sohn, PhD (2015-2023)
Michael Yoo, PhD (2020-2022)
Rishi Rajalingham, PhD (2019-2022)
Egger, Seth, PhD (2013-2019)
Remington, Evan, PhD (2014-2019)
Wang, Jing, PhD (2013-2018)
Narain, Devika, PhD (2015-2017)
Aghdaee, Mehdi, PhD (2013)

PhD Students Supervised (primary supervisor)
Alexandra Ferguson (2023)
Eli Pollock (2022)
Morteza Sarafyazd (2021)
Nicolas Meirhaeghe (2021)

Visiting Members
Albert Qin, UROP Student (2023)
Olivia Gozel, Ph.D (2023)
Isabella Milanes, MSRP Summer Intern (2023)
Adam Gosztolai, Ph.D (2023)
Jason Li, , UROP Student (2022-2023)
Xiaomei Fan, SCGB Fellow (SURF Program) (2022)
Sandy Wang, SCGB Fellow (SURF Program) (2022)
Chisom Ume, SCGB Fellow (SURF Program) (2022)
Clara Melhem, SCGB Fellow (SURF Program) (2022)
Dagim Belete (2021)
Shadi Tasdighi Kalat (2019)
Xiang Li (2017)
Lucy Lai, CSNE (2016)
Elliot Nauert, MSTP CBMM (2015)
Vivian Liu, MSRP (2014)
Chau Vu, UROP, MIT (2013)

Staff
Jack Gabel (2021-2023)
T. Vincenza Parks (2016-2020)
Adam Akkad (2017-2020)
Eghbal Asl Hosseini (2015-2016)
Rossana Chung (2013-2018)