NEW YORK UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Large - Scale Scientific Modeling and Efficient Numerical Methods
Job Titles:
- Professor of Neural Science Ph.D. 2002, Harvard University
Aditi joined the lab in August 2017, when she was a student at the Horace Greeley High School in Westchester NY. She worked with Andra on memory-based target localization. She left the lab in 2019.
Ahmad Qamar worked in the lab from Jun 2010 to Jun 2012 while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. His project was about Bayesian inference in visual categorization, and neural network implementations of the same task. He is now a data scientist.
Job Titles:
- Functional Interactions of Neurons in a Network
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Experimental Economics, Microeconomics, Game Theory, Neurobiology of Decision
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Professor of Neural Science Ph.D. 1998, SUNY Health Science Center
Angela was a high school senior attending Herricks High School in Long Island, NY. She worked with Peiyuan on a project involving the factors and effects of procrastination. She hopes to pursue a career in computer science and data analytics.
Angelo is an undergraduate in Neuroscience and Economics at NYU. In his project, with Luigi and Yanli, he trains unsupervised neural networks to mimic human perceptual organization.
Anne is a PhD student from the University of Bristol, UK, who visited the lab in June 2019. She is interested in building computational models of metacognition and metacognitive biases. In the Ma lab, she explored the association between self-performance beliefs, mental effort and task performance building computational models inspired by research on implicit theories of intelligence and economics. For example, she asked questions like: Under what conditions, is mental effort expended? When do people decide to avoid performing at all and why? Can certain personality traits explain potential individual differences in effort-based decision-making? Outside of academia, Anne enjoys getting lost, in books, painting(s), the forest and - when she was in NYC - the city, preferably on a bicycle. She left the lab in August 2019.
Bas van Opheusden Neurotree | Google Scholar Bas joined the lab in 2014 as a Ph.D. student in Neuroscience. He worked on modeling human reasoning in a tractable combinatorial strategy game. He did an internship at Oculus. He defended in October 2018 and is now a postdoc in the lab of Tom Griffiths at Princeton.
Job Titles:
- How Neuronal Activity Regulates Behavior
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Neuronal Dynamics and Decision Making. Lab Homepage
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Physiology and Neuroscience ( School of Medicine ), and Neural Science Ph.D. 2010, Washington University, St. Louis
Carolina Di Tella NeuroTree Carolina was a PhD student in the Center for Neural Science and joined the lab in 2018. As an undergraduate, she studied economics in Argentina. She worked with Wei Ji and Paul Glimcher on the behavior and neural basis of other-regarding preferences using decision problems with trade-offs between multiple agents. She defended her thesis on July 9, 2020. Carolina enjoys cooking her master dishes for her friends. She is now a lecturer at the University of San Andrés.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Learning and Decision - Making across Development. Lab Homepage
Job Titles:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
- Professor of Neural Science and Biology Ph.D. 1985, the Rockefeller University
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Neural Science Ph.D. 2013, Columbia University
Job Titles:
- Professor of Neural Science Ph.D. 1988, University of Genoa
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Learning and Memory, Neural Circuits, Probabilistic Computation. Lab Homepage
Job Titles:
- Development and Plasticity of the Auditory System. Lab Homepage
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Information Processing in the Retina
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science Ph.D. 2003, University of Wisconsin, Madison
David Halpern Google Scholar | LinkedIn David was a PhD student in Cognition and Perception who worked primarily with Todd Gureckis. He did a rotation project with Wei Ji on approximate Bayesian inference in neural circuits. Since 2020, he has been a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Mathematics and Neural Science Ph.D. 1971, Indiana University
Deepna Devkar LinkedIn Deepna was a Ph.D. student from 2011 to 2014 at Baylor College of Medicine, primarily working with Anthony Wright. Following a rotation project, she worked with Wei Ji on visual search, the optimality of perception, and sources of variability in perception. After graduation, she started a career as a data scientist.
Job Titles:
- Janice Cutler Professor of Chemistry Professor of Neural Science Ph.D. 1997, University of Vienna
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Oflactory Information Processing in the Behaving Animal. Lab Homepage
Job Titles:
- Research Professor of Child and Adolescent
Donald A. Wilson, Research Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (School of Medicine) and Neural Science; Research Scientist, Emotional Brain Institute, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research; Ph.D. 1983, McMaster University.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Neural Science, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering ( School of Engineering ) Ph.D. 1991, University of Minnesota
Job Titles:
- Control of Glutamate Receptors at Excitatory Synapses. Lab Homepage
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Professor of Biology and Neural Science Ph.D. 1973, the Rockefeller University
Elaina Bolinger worked in the lab from Oct to Dec 2008 as a visiting student from Jacobs University (Germany). She went on to earn her PhD from the University of Tübingen (Germany) and is now a scientific evidence manager in industry.
Emin joined the lab in 2013 after receiving his Ph.D. in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester in 2013. His main research interest is to understand cognitive and perceptual phenomena using theoretical/computational models at multiple levels of analysis, employing concepts from machine learning and theoretical neuroscience. He left the lab in 2016 and is now a Moore-Sloan Data Science Fellow at NYU, working mostly with Brenden Lake.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Molecular Mechanisms of Learning and Memory. Lab Homepage
- Professor
Eugenia Prezhdo LinkedIn Elaina was a a postbac research assistant in 2012-2013. She worked on Bayesian inference in visual categorization.. She is now a is now in data science.
Job Titles:
- Cognitive Language Development
- Professor
Gianni worked in the lab from 2014 to 2017, initially while being a Masters student in Psychology at NYU. He worked on planning in combinatorial games and is still collaborating on a project that investigates memory of board positions. He is now a data scientist.
Helga was a postbac research assistant in 2010-2012. She is now a PhD student University Southern California.
Hongsup Shin joined the lab as a graduate student in 2010, when the lab was still at Baylor College of Medicine. He defended his PhD on the limitations of visual working memory in 2015, and continued as a postdoc through January 2016. He is now a data scientist.
Hsin-Hung received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology in NYU under the supervision of David Heeger and Marisa Carrasco. During his PhD., he studied how attention impacts visual perception in different contexts, such as bistable perception and saccadic eye movements. He continued as a postdoc in NYU, working with Wei Ji and Clay Curtis. He uses both computational modeling and fMRI technique to study how humans report confidence and uncertainty in perceptual decision-making and visual working memory tasks.
Jake Topping LinkedIn | Google Scholar Jake finished his Masters at Oxford University in June 2019, and joined the lab in July 2019. He worked on training a deep reinforcement learning network to play four-in-a-row. He left the lab in September 2019 and is now a PhD student in Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Assistant Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience ( School of Medicine ), and Neural Science Ph.D. 2007, Baylor College of Medicine
Jennifer Laura Lee jenn.laura.lee@nyu.edu | Neurotree | Twitter Jenn was a Ph.D. student in Neuroscience who joined the lab in 2018 and defended in 2022. She is interested in questions at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy (neuroethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science). She investigated how people decide that seemingly independent observations share a common underlying cause. She is a founding member and past president of the Scientist Action and Advocacy Network.
Job Titles:
- Mathematical Biology
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Academic Affairs Administrator
Job Titles:
- Ocular Imaging and Regenerative Ophthalmology
- Professor
Joshua Calder-Travis Website | Twitter Joshua visited the lab in September 2018 as a PhD student from Oxford University. He is interested in simple behavioural tasks that may support a principled understanding of how perception is mapped to action. In the lab, he is modelling behaviour in a visual search task and, in particular, comparing behaviour to the responses of an optimal Bayesian observer. He left the lab in December 2018 and is now a postdoc in the lab of Tobias Donner in University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Professor of Biology and Neural Science Ph.D. 1996, King 's College, London
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Professor of Psychology and Neural Science Ph.D. 1993, Emory University
Karen Marsden worked in the lab from May 2009 to May 2012, while an undergraduate at Rice University. Her project, co-supervised by Pearl Chiu, was about the neural basis of intrinsic motivation. She went on to earn her MD from Baylor College of Medicine and is now an internist.
Job Titles:
- Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science Professor of Mathematics and Neural Science Ph.D. 1978, University of California, Berkeley
Human perception and control of self-motion, visuomotor control, eye-hand coordination and virtual reality. Lab homepage
Long visited the lab in 2016 from NYU Shanghai. His project was about the quantitative modeling of interference in the n-back task. He left the lab in 2017 and continues as collaborator. He is now a PhD student at University of Pennsylvania.
Luísa graduated from NYU, majoring in Neural Science with a minor in Chemistry. She joined the lab in the summer of 2020 and wrote her honors thesis on procrastination and the intention-behavior gap. She's planning on applying to graduate school soon. In her free time, she enjoys playing different musical instruments, loves going to concerts and listening to the Beatles and Queen. She is excited to be working in the lab!
Job Titles:
- Development of Visual Function. Lab Homepage
- Professor
Maija started as an undergraduate in psychology and biology at NYU, and continued as a graduate research assistant. She is interested in memory, perception, and clinical neurology. She has previously worked on Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury, and progressive supranuclear palsy. Currently, she investigates certainty in visual working memory and whether the brain maintains a representation of precision for memories. She has lived and studied in three different countries.
Manisha Bhardwaj LinkedIn Manisha did her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Houston. Her primary advisor was Kresimir Josic and her second advisor was Wei Ji, when he was at Baylor College of Medicine. Manisha worked on visual search among correlated stimuli. After graduating in 2013, she started working as a data scientist.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Perception, Decision - Making, and Learning in Neural Circuits. Lab Homepage
Job Titles:
- Clinical Associate Professor in Neural Science Ph.D. 2009, City University of New York
Job Titles:
- Cohen Professor of Hearing Science, Professor of Otolaryngology ( School of Medicine ) and Neural Science Ph.D. 1988, Tulane University
Job Titles:
- Clinical Professor of Neural Science Director, Office of Veterinary Resources V.M. 1986, Universidad Autónoma De Ciudad Juárez
Masih Rahmati Google Scholar | LinkedIn | Lab Website Masih was a masters students in 2009-2011. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University.
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Lilian and George Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics Professor of Mathematics and Neural Science Ph.D. 1985, University of Arizona
Michael was a masters students in 2010 primarily working with Kresimir Josic.
Yunqi "Emma" Li Yunqi Li was an undergraduate who workied with Bas and Gianni on combinatorial strategy games. In her free time, she is a aspiring photographer and guitarist.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Molecular Mechanisms Underlying the Regulation and Function of Sleep
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Cell Biology ( School of Medicine ) and Neural Science Ph.D. 2000, Yale University
Nuwan joined the lab in 2011 after receiving his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2011. In the lab, he worked on optimal resource allocation to multiple items. He left the lab in 2015 and is now a data scientist.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science Ph.D. 2007, University of Chicago
Paul is an undergraduate in Neural Science at NYU. In his project, with Luigi, he tests whether a feature prior affects resource allocation in addition to affecting the decision rule.
Peiyuan Zhang pz580@nyu.edu | Neurotree | Twitter Hi, I am a Ph.D. student in the Center for Neural Science and joined the lab in 2019. My thesis work is about the mechanism of procrastination and strategies to beat procrastination. Besides scientific work, I have passion in documentary film making as well.
Job Titles:
- Research Professor of Child and Adolescent
Regina Sullivan, Research Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (School of Medicine) and Neural Science; Research Scientist, Emotional Brain Institute, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research; Ph.D. 1983, CUNY.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Otolaryngology, Physiology and Neuroscience ( School of Medicine ), and Neural Science Ph.D. 2004, University of California, Berkeley
Job Titles:
- Natalie Clews Spencer Professor of the Sciences Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, and Biology Ph.D. 1970, the Rockefeller University
Ronald joined the lab in 2009 after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Groningen. He worked mostly on models of working memory. He left the lab in 2012 and did a postdoc with Daniel Wolpert at the University of Cambridge. He is now Associate Professor at the University of Stockholm.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Decision Making, Visual Shape and Motion Processing. Lab Homepage
Ryan George worked in the lab from Oct 2008 to Jan 2009 and from Aug 2009 to May 2011, while an undergraduate at Rice University. He did one project on visual working memory and one on Bayesian inference in visual categorization. He is now a data scientist.
Sam is a Ph.D. student in Neuroscience and rotated in the lab in 2020-2021. He is broadly interested in a computational understanding of the brain and the mind, from the single cell, circuit, network... all the way to cognition, emotion and behavior. He likes exploring the function of his own brain too, especially through meditation. Informally he wants to walk the middle way between science and philosophy, letting the bright sides of both illuminate each other.
Shaiyan was a postbac research assistant in 2010-2011. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at York University.
Shan Shen LinkedIn | Google Scholar Shan was a Ph.D. student at Baylor College of Medicine, primarily working with Andreas Tolias. Following a rotation project, she worked with Wei Ji on visual search, the optimality of perception, and sources of variability in perception. After graduation, she started a career as a data scientist.
Stuart Jackson Google Scholar | Neurotree Stuart was a PhD student in the Center for Neural Science who joined the lab in December 2013 and worked on the precision of encoding contrast and orientation in visual short-term memory. He defended his thesis in December 2015. He is now a data scientist.
Job Titles:
- Motivation, Learning, and Hormones
Harrison He Harrison was a student at The Collegiate School in New York City. He worked on combining working memory with reward.
Tashi was a student at the High School for the Health and Human Services Professions in New York City. She worked with Aspen on the effect of configuration on visual working memory for spatial location.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Neural Science Ph.D. 1970, University of California, Riverside
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Memory, Learning, Decision - Making in Humans. Lab Homepage
Trevor Holland worked in the lab from Oct 2008 to Aug 2009 while an undergraduate at Rice University, and later continued as a collaborator. He worked on causal inference in auditory-visual perception.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Neural Science and Psychology Ph.D. 2001, University of Groningen
- Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU
- Professors
Wei Ji Ma is Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU. His lab studies decision-making in perception, attention, working memory, social cognition, and planning, using a combination of human behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and - through collaboration - electrophysiology and neuroimaging. Wei Ji grew up in the Netherlands and received M.Sc.s in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Groningen. He did his Ph.D. in Physics at the same place, but was mostly supervised by Erik Verlinde at Utrecht University and Princeton University. He continued as a postdoc in computational neuroscience, first with Christof Koch at Caltech and then with Alexandre Pouget at the University of Rochester. Along the way, he became more interested and involved in experimental psychology and the mathematical modeling of cognition. He was Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine from 2008 to 2013, with an affiliate appointment in Psychology at Rice University. He has been at NYU since 2013, as full Professor since 2020. He has affiliate appointments in the Neuroscience Institute, the Institute for the Study of Decision Making, the Center for Data Science, and the Center for Experimental Social Science. With Xiao-Jing Wang, Wei Ji is Program Director of the NIH-funded Training Program in Computational Neuroscience at NYU. Moreover, Wei Ji is active in mentorship, community-building, and outreach. He is a founding member of the Scientist Action and Advocacy Network (founder: Will Adler) and of NeuWrite NYU (founder: Alex Berardino). With Cristina Alberini, Wei Ji founded the Growing up in Science seminar series, in which scientists tell their "unofficial stories". Read or listen to Wei Ji's own unofficial story. Besides his academic work, Wei Ji is the co-founder (with Diane Geng and Sara Lam) of the Rural China Education Foundation. He enjoys strategy games, badminton, science-art collaborations, immersive theater, and exploring food. 马伟基是美国纽约大学神经科学和心理学教授，他注重研究人类的感知、记忆及决策。他是一名荷兰华裔，其祖辈在上世纪二十年代从中国烟台移民到荷兰。马伟基于格罗宁根大学先后获得物理学硕士、数学硕士和物理学博士学位。从2002至2008年间，他分别在加州理工学院和罗彻斯特大学从事计算神经学方面的博士后研究工作，并在贝勒医学院开始他的教学生涯 (2008-2013)。他长期致力于教育政策、非营利组织管理及科学普及领域的发展，并于2005年成立了乡村教育促进会。
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Synaptic Mechanisms of Learning and Memory
Wen-Chuang was a postbac research assistant in Mar-Oct 2009. He is now a research associate.
Will Adler Personal Website Neurotree | Google Scholar | Twitter Will was a student in Neuroscience who joined the lab in 2013 and worked on modeling confidence judgments in visual categorization tasks. He is also the founder of the Scientist Action and Advocacy Network and the Early-Career Policy Ambassador of the Society for Neuroscience. In his free time, he worries about graphic design or bikes long distances. He defended in 2017, and continued as a collaborator until January 2018. He is now Senior Technologist in Elections & Democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology.
Xiang is a Ph.D. student in Cognition and Perception and joined the lab in 2018. He currently works on probabilistic inference in two-player strategic games. He is generally interested in various forms of decision-making, and in applying ML and information theory to these processes. In his free time, he enjoys video games, soccer, poetry, and post-rock music.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Microcircuits Underlying State - Dependent Regulation of Information Processing
Xuan worked with Wei Ji and with Jon Freeman on working memory for faces defined by race and gender.
Yang was a a postbac research assistant in from Nov 2012 to Feb 2013. She worked on the aperture problem in vision.
Yanli started working in the Ma Lab as an undergraduate in Psychology and Mathematics at NYU. She graduated in 2016, continued at NYU as a Masters student in Data Science, and has since 2018 been a PhD student in Data Science with Brenden Lake at NYU. Her project is about the role of uncertainty in collinearity judgments. In her free time, she is a pastry chef or a singer!
Zeming completed his Masters in Psychology at NYU in 2017 in the lab. He worked with Jonathan Winawer and Wei Ji on improving the second-order contrast model of early visual cortex. Zeming likes playing badminton and is an experienced calligrapher. He left the lab in 2018 and is now a PhD student with Chris Sims at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Zhenyu started working in the lab as an undergraduate but since then got his B.Sc. in Neural Science from NYU Shanghai. His project (with Wei Ji and Emin Orhan) is about training supervised neural networks under non-uniform stimulus distributions, and seeing what kind of selectivity emerges. Zhenyu enjoys binge-watching movies, TV series, and political satire shows.
Zhiwei worked in the lab as a summer student in 2014 while an undergraduate in physics at Beijing University. In 2016 she became a PhD student with Todd Gureckis at NYU, and defended on Sep 24, 2021. With Wei Ji, she worked on the effects of visual fixations on value-based decision-making.