Rishidev Chaudhuri, PhD

Computation in the brain emerges from the collective activity of large populations of neurons. Despite experimental advances, frameworks for understanding computation in these large distributed systems are scarce. The lack is especially acute in cognitive areas of the brain, where neural activity reflects complex combinations of external variables and internal dynamics, representations depend strongly on context, and networks are often strongly-coupled and highly recurrent. My research studies this collective computation along two main directions. First, I seek to decipher and mathematically formalize the information processing strategies (or algorithms) that underlie neural computation, with a focus on cognitive computations in the neocortex and hippocampus. Second, I use recordings of neural population activity data from experimental collaborators to build and test data-driven models of canonical neural computations such as decision-making and working memory.