I am a recent graduate from the lab of Michale Fee in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, where I studied the neural circuits that underlying the acquisition and production of complex motor behaviors. I am interested in understanding how people and animals learn and produce the amazing behaviors that they are capable of, and building tools that make it possible to study these neural feats.
Whether it is speaking to one another, or nailing a tennis serve, humans can perform an incredible range of behaviors, most of which are learned. How do we and other animals learn complicated sequential behaviors, and once they are learned how are they executed? These were the framing questions of my Ph.D. thesis, which investigated the neural basis of the two modes of behavior that occur at the beginning and end of learning a motor skill: the initially highly variable exploratory behavior, and the ultimately stereotyped skilled performance. To understand the start and end points of learned motor behaviors, I studied the premotor activity of ensembles of neurons that underlie song production in zebra finches.
To accomplish this, I made a few tiny electronic devices that record the activity of multiple neurons at the same time, wrote a lot of Julia and MATLAB code, analyzed large datasets of neural activity, and tested the statistical predictions of different models of how the brain works.
PhD in neuroscience, 2020
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
BSc in biology, 2010
The Pennsylvania State University
BSc in mathematics, 2010
The Pennsylvania State University
I was a teaching assistant for the following courses at MIT: