News and Views

About 2 years ago, I was home sick with Covid wondering how to spend my time while I waited to get back into the lab. We had some experiments slated, which we had proposed for my NSF fellowship in which we had proposed the idea that Bayesian updating was responsible for the winner/effects. We had pitched it as a simple conceptual model, but since I had a few days at home, I thought I could code it up as a proper agent-based simulation, to see if our intuitions were correct. 10 days later, I had a solid simulation with some cool preliminary results. Let’s write it up as a paper, we said. It will be fun, we said.

New paper just dropped! This was the first project I worked on at Penn as a grad student and my deepest dive into neuroscience thus far. After pivoting towards computer vision and behavior, Jessie Burke (now at Columbia), took over the final, very technical experiments and wrote the paper to get it to publication. It’s a cool project, and I am really happy to have been a part of it (though in total honesty, I was happy to move on to less crunchy neuro projects).

Back in July, I got to present at the Animal Behavior Society (ABS) virtual conference. ABS is always a bit intense, not because the people are mean or intimidating, I feel like ABS is one of the most welcoming conferences I’ve participated in. It’s just so much. Most of the talks are 15-30 minutes, and they have about 4 parallel sessions going at once, So you spend all day, for several days, running around the venue trying to get to the talks that you want to catch, and inevitably you are faced with some impossible dilemmas and you just have to choose. A friend of mine described it as a “science bender”, which I think is pretty accurate.

I love exploration. When I was a kid, I spent most of my time wandering around the roads and woods near my house. I would leave after school on my bike and or roller blades and try to find roads parts of my neighborhood I’d never seen, or I would walk along the creek that ran though my backyard all the way to where it met the Pearl River. I still am always hoping to find new ways to get from place to place in Philly. Exploration is the best.