Sheila Nirenberg

The theme of our research is to advance basic understanding of computational neuroscience, and, in parallel, use what we learn to address practical problems that improve quality of life.

Our work is organized around three major goals:

• To understand the codes neurons use and the transformations they perform
• To use this understanding to build neuroprosthetics, brain machine interfaces, and robots
• To circle back and use our knowledge of the codes and transformations to advance other questions in systems neuroscience (e.g., population coding, how neurons collectively represent visual scenes, extract information, etc.)

So far, we’ve been focusing on these goals in the context of vision, but the ideas and tools generalize to other systems as well.