Alumni

John Beausang

John Beausang

John Beausang was a graduate student in the Physics Department. He has worked on a variety of experimental and theoretical problems in tethered particle motion and molecular motors. John is presently a postdoc at Stanford.

Bart Borghuis

Bart Borghuis

Bart Borghuis worked on retinal structure and function. He then worked in the laboratories of Anthony Leonardo at Janelia Farms and Jon Demb at Yale, and is currently a professor at the University of Kentucky.

John Briguglio

John Briguglio

John Briguglio came to Penn after an undergraduate degree at Carnegie-Mellon and was a graduate student in the Physics department. He received a PhD for work on the visual and olfactory systems and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Yi Chen

Yi Chen worked on repulsion of oppositely-charged colloidal objects.

Niral Desai

Niral Desai

Niral Desai was an undergraduate at Penn majoring in Physics. His work explored the role of the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus in navigation. He is currently a graduate student in Physics at the University of Texas, Austin.

Patrick Garrigan

Patrick Garrigan

Patrick Garrigan was a postdoc in the lab. He worked on the organization of the cone mosaic and efficient coding in the retina. He is currently a professor at St. Joseph’s University in the psychology department and works on problems in perception.

Ann Hermundstad

Ann Hermundstad

Ann Hermundstad received a PhD in Physics from the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB). She was a postdoc in the group at Penn, working on problems in theoretical and computational neuroscience, focusing both on specific sensory pathways and integrated whole-brain studies. She employed a range of theoretical, computational, and data-driven techniques to probe how different cellular architectures support and constrain emergent biological function. Her work touched on a broad set of related questions that elucidate how resources are distributed across populations of cells, how local interactions shape information flow across the population, and how the structure of interactions adapts over time and in response to stimulus variations. Current projects relate to population coding in the retina, visual perception of higher-order spatial statistics, olfactory processing, and structure-function relationships in the human brain. Ann is currently a Group Leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Jan Homann

Jan Homann

Jan Homann was a graduate student in the Physics Department and used experimental and theoretical approaches to study local microcircuits in the retina system. He is currently a postdoc at Princeton University investigating information processing in the visual cortex.

Alex Keinath

Alex Keinath

Alexandra Keinath was a graduate student in Psychology who studied spatial representation in the broader hippocampal formation. To do so, she employed a range of techniques including in vivo rodent electrophysiological recording, computational modeling, and behavioral experiments in both rodents and humans. Her PhD focused on understanding how boundaries shape and anchor spatial representations and navigation behavior at multiple levels of explanation.  She is currently a Banting Fellow at McGill University.

Pavel Konov

Pavel Konov

Pavel Konov was an undergraduate majoring in Philosophy and Physics. He worked on population coding in the retina.

Kamesh Krishnamurthy

Kamesh Krishnamurthy

Kamesh Krishnamurthy received his neuroscience PhD in 2018 in theoretical and computational approaches to problems in systems neuroscience.  He is currently a fellow of the Center for the Physics of Biological Function at Princeton.

Igor Kulic

Igor Kulic worked on transport in the cytoplasm. He is currently at CNRS in Strasbourg, after his postdoctoral work in the lab of L Mahadevan (Harvard).

Jordan Lei

Jordan Lei

Jordan Lei was an undergraduate studying Computer Science and Finance in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania​. He worked on  the application of Neural Networks and Deep Learning in modeling and classification, and on applying Deep Neural Networks to infer the architecture of the visual pathway.

Josh Merel

Josh Merel

Josh Merel was an undergraduate in the Biological Basis of Behavior program. His senior thesis involved two directions of research: (1) the statistics of shapes in natural scenes and the representation of shapes in Inferotemporal Cortex, and (2) possible algorithms for goal-directed navigation based on the representation of location by hippocampal place cells. After a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience at Columbia he moved to Google Deep Mind.

J David Moroz

J David Moroz worked on a variety of problems in soft matter physics.

Chetan Parthiban

Chetan Parthiban

Chetan Parthiban was an undergraduate in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Penn.  In the lab he is worked on a project applying deep learning to the output of the retina.

Eli Pollock

Eli Pollock

Eli was an undergraduate at Penn studying physics and biophysics. He was interested in how complex biological systems give rise to coherent patterns and behaviors, and investigated computational neural models for spatial cognition. He is currently a PhD student in Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT.

Thomas R. Powers

Thomas R. Powers

Jason Prentice

Jason Prentice

Jason Prentice was a graduate student in the Physics Department working on problems in neuroscience. He worked on a variety of theoretical problems including location coding by place cells, and does multi-electrode array experiments. He was a C.V. Starr Fellow in the Princeton Neurosciences Institute and is currently working in industry in Data Sciences.

Prashant Purohit

Prashant Purohit worked on mechanics of DNA, including DNA looping. He is currently a professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn.

Dutch Ratliff

Dutch Ratliff

Dutch Ratliff was a graduate student in the lab. His thesis was on theoretical models of retinal organization. He was a postdoc in the laboratories of Steve DeVries at Northwestern University and with Alapakkam Sampath at USC. He is currently a freelance research scientist.

Kristina Simmons

Kristina Simmons

Kristina Simmons was a graduate student in the Neuroscience Department. She used multi-electrode array experiments to study retinal adaptation to stimulus statistics. Kristina is moving into a career in health policy.

Vijay Singh

Vijay Singh

Vijay Singh came to Penn after finishing his Ph.D. in Physics from Emory University. He was the Computational Neuroscience Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow from 2015-2019. He collaborated with Joel Mainland’s group at Monell Chemical Senses Center to develop biophysical models of olfactory receptors. As a CNI fellow, he also collaborated with Prof. David Brainard and Prof. Johannes Burge (Psychology) to study color perception in humans. Vijay is currently an assistant professor at North Carolina A&T State University.

Kalina Slavkova

Kalina Slavkova

Kalina Slavkova was an undergraduate at Penn who majored in physics and biology with a minor in math. Her past projects have focused on the structure of the human protein p38a, the function of the small-T protein in human papillomavirus 7, and the formulation of rule-based models and boolean networks of biological systems. Her senior thesis with the group investigated the categorization of objects in natural images as well as gist perception with intended applications in the study of artworks from different movements. She is currently a graduate student in physics at UT Austin.

Kees Storm

Kees Storm worked on mechanical properties of DNA. He is currently a professor at TU Eindhoven.

Gasper Tkacik

Gasper Tkacik

Gasper Tkacik was a postdoc in the lab who finished his PhD in Physics at Princeton University in 2007. He is studying how biological networks process information and has applied information theory to understand aspects of retinal processing, early morphogenesis in the fruit fly embryo, and signal transduction in cellular networks. His other research interests include the statistics of natural scenes, collective behaviors in biology, the dynamics of evolutionary adaptation and, recently, questions about the evolution of natural languages. He is currently a professor and group leader at the Institute for Science and Technology, Austria.

Kevin Towles

Kevin Towles worked on the DNA looping, including the first principles calculation of looping probability.

Xuexin Wei

Xuexin Wei

Xuexin Wei was a graduate student in the psychology department. He wrote his thesis on the organization of the grid system in the entorhinal cortex that supports our "sense of place", and on problems in visual perception and Bayesian decision making.  After a postdoctoral fellowship in theoretical neuroscience at Columbia University he joined the University of Texas, Austin as an Assistant Professor.

Eugene Wong

Eugene Wong is currently a tenured professor at University of Western Ontario.

Martin Zapotocky

Martin Zapotocky is currently heading a research group at MPI Complex Systems in Dresden.

Alicia Zeng

Alicia Zeng

Alicia Zeng was a Visiting Research Scientist in the lab. She received her bachelor's degrees in Physics and in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University and is currently working on problems in theoretical neuroscience.