About Me
I am currently a Research Scientist and Shanahan Fellow at the Allen Institute and University of Washington, co-mentored by Christof Koch (Allen) and Eric Shea-Brown (UW). I am working in both the Data-Driven Discovery (D3) center and the Brain & Consciousness group at Allen Institute. I am also affiliated with the Computational Neuroscience Center at University of Washington (UW-CNC). At Allen Institute, I address fundamental questions in neuroscience by developing advanced mathematical models that bridge AI and brain research.
Prior to joining the Allen Institute, I earned my PhD in Statistics from London School of Economics (LSE), supervised by Milan Vojnovic and supported by the Lee Family Scholarship. I also worked at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) as a research intern in the summer of year 2021, mentored by Wei Chen. Before my PhD, I spent my undergraduate at St John's College of the University of Oxford and received a master's degree in mathematics and statistics in 2018.
Research Interests
From my PhD, I’ve been working on a Relational learning, i.e., learning in a context where we have a group of items with relationships. Relational learning enables effective reasoning about richly structured data. It is a sub-field of high-dimensional statistics that uses machine learning and applied probability methods to extract insights from datasets. I am interested in the underlying statistical inference, optimization, approximation and learning problems.
My work at the Allen Institute spans both spatial and temporal analysis of neuronal datasets, with a unifying focus on studying neuronal populations as interconnected cell types. Specifically, I investigate their spatial organization, firing patterns, and interactions across diverse brain states—including loss of consciousness, active behavior, and disease onset. For example, at the Brain & Consciousness lab led by Christof Koch, we study the effects of psychedelic drugs on the brain at the cellular level using simultaneously recorded neuronal units via Neuropixels probes. Our work focuses on the network-level effects of psilocybin-induced changes in spiking dynamics among L5p neurons and functional interactions between L5p cell types. I find neuronal datasets an ideal testing ground for relational learning methods and a source of inspiration for advancing them.
For more information on my research projects, see my research here.