Team
Pedro Gonçalves
Group leader
I am a Group Leader at NERF since May 2023. I am also a member of ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). Before starting my lab, I did a postdoc with Maneesh Sahani at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, London, followed by a postdoc in Jakob Macke’s lab at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. My PhD was supervised by Christian Machens at Ecole normale superieure, Paris.
Experimental methods to study the brain and behavior have advanced greatly in the past decade, generating large-scale and high-resolution data, which are increasingly hard to interpret. Our lab specializes in combining theoretical models and the most advanced machine learning methods to extract knowledge from such complex data so we can learn how the brain operates in health and disease.
Anastasia (Nastya) Krouglova
PhD student
I obtained an MSc in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from VUB, Brussels, and worked as a Research Intern at ETH Zürich. For my Master's thesis, I developed a framework for the multipurpose description and evaluation of audio signals under the supervision of Geraint Wiggins. This framework allows inference from different subtasks and proposes a general improvement in the learnability of machine learning models.
As a PhD student in the Goncalves lab, I will develop and use computational methods to investigate the role of different scales — from membrane and synaptic biophysics to connectivity patterns — in conferring robustness to neural systems. We will investigate this question with a combination of neural circuit modeling, and the development and application of machine learning methods to extract mechanistic insights from neural data.
Auguste Schulz
Associated PhD Student, Tübingen University
I studied physics in Heidelberg/London and for my masters neuroengineering in Munich before joining Jakob Macke's lab at the University of Tübingen as a PhD student in fall 2019. I am currently working on state-space models for neuroscience, in particular on sequential variational autoencoders for linking neural population activity and behaviour.
Michael Deistler
Associated PhD Student, Tübingen University
I joined Jakob Macke's lab as a master’s student in March 2019 and then continued in the lab as a PhD student. I develop machine learning tools for neuroscience research and work on algorithms for simulation-based inference.
Rachel Rapp
Associated PhD Student, Tübingen University
I studied AI and cognitive neuroscience in Spain and the US before joining Jakob Macke's lab at the University of Tübingen as a PhD student in September 2021. I am using deep neural networks to study how populations of neurons encode visual information in the human brain. I am co-advised by Prof. Dr. Dr. Florian Mormann.
Serkan Şentürk
MSc student
I am pursuing an MSc degree in Statistics and Data Science at KU Leuven and have joined the Gonçalves lab as an MSc student.