Principal Investigator

Maria is interested in the way the brain encodes information about the world around us. She combines computational and biological approaches to study the mechanisms behind the transformation of sensory representations.

Maria first got interested in systems neuroscience through her undergraduate thesis under mentorship of John Hopfield at Princeton University, in which she explored the mechanics of whisking in rats. She studied texture encoding in the somatosensory system with Christopher Moore at MIT during her first two years of graduate school at Harvard.  She completed her Ph.D. in the laboratory of Markus Meister at Harvard University, where she discovered a novel retinal circuit for processing moving images. After her Ph.D., she was an independent fellow at Rockefeller University, where she worked first in collaboration with the Laurent laboratory on temporal processing in the olfactory systen, and next under mentorship of Marcelo Magnasco, exploring the dynamics of natural sounds.

In her free time, she enjoys listening to natural and unnatural sounds while flaneuring across cities, parks, beaches and mountains. She may be spotted after work making funny noises with her kids on the local playgrounds.

Collaborators

Janet Werker (UBC)

Judit Gervain (University Descartes Paris V)

Yale Cohen (University of Pennsylvania)

Brian Litt (University of Pennsylvania)

Diego Contreras (University of Pennsylvania)

Diego Laplagne (Rockefeller University)

Marcelo Magnasco (Rockefeller University)

Graduate students

Post-doctoral fellows

Undergraduate students

Lab Alumni

Research Staff