I’m a post-doc at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, working with David Fitzpatrick on the tree shrew visual system. In July 2023, I’ll start as an assistant professor at the department of Neurobiology & Behavior at Cornell University. My lab will study how visual circuits in the brain meet the specialized behavioral demands of different animals.

I want to understand how the visual system becomes perfectly suited to an animal’s specific visual experience. A lot of factors influence visual experience across an animal’s life-time, like the structure of the retina, the environment, and how the animal moves around in its environment. I’ve studied the visual system of mice, cats, and tree shrews, trying to determine how neural connections transform visual inputs. More recently, I’ve started to think about how these transformations are shaped by, and shape, an animal’s specific movement patterns.

I think the most clever, and interesting, path towards understanding the brain includes multiple animals, and leveraging the quirks each one comes with. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked on establishing the tree shrew as a model of the extrastriate visual system.

I’m hiring at all levels and looking for people who are excited about a team-based approach to understanding the visual system in the context of the moving body it lives in.