Visual selectivity emerges from connectome and task constraints in the fruit fly visual system

My PhD at MIT was supervised by Sebastian Seung during which I developed machine learning methods for reconstructing the connectivity of neural circuits from 3d electron microscopic datasets. Led by Winfried Denk, we used these methods to map the circuitry of the inner plexiform layer of the mouse retina. These methods are also the "AI" that power EyeWire, a citizen-science project led by the Sebastian Seung, which uses crowd-sourcing to map a much larger volume of the mouse retina, also imaged by the Denk lab. During my postdoc at the incredible Gatsby Unit at University College London, I was advised by Peter Dayan and Michael Hausser. At UCL, I worked on building statistical models of large-scale neural activity recordings.