Postdoc Anne Draelos awarded CASI

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) announced Anne Draelos, Ph.D. as one of the recipients of the 2021 Career Awards at the Scientific Interface (CASI). This postdoc-faculty bridging award brings an infusion of funds and early career support to researchers conducting biological research through interdisciplinary approaches.

Anne is a postdoctoral associate with a flair for interdisciplinarity, as evidenced by the fact that she is working under the combined mentorship of both John Pearson and Eva Naumann.  The CASI grant will support her proposed project Adaptive Algorithms for Online Neural Modeling.  

Anne's research goals include developing statistical algorithms and online analysis tools that make adaptive experimental designs possible, to better learn and link brain activity to behavior in real time. To achieve this, she plans to design online models that can learn simpler representations of the collective activity from large populations of neurons, and couple these models with tools to learn states of behavior online. She aims to then use these models and design new algorithms for learning the complicated mapping between direct stimulations of neurons and those neural and behavioral states. Ultimately, Anne will design adaptive stimulation patterns that deliberately guide behavior among states in real time, giving us an insight into how the brain can drive behavior.  

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