Niru Maheswaranathan
Neurosciences
Bio-X Honorary Fellow 2013/2014
Profs. Surya Ganguli (Applied Physics) and Stephen Baccus (Neurobiology)

Our current understanding of early sensory processing fails to explain neural responses to ethologically relevant stimuli. For example, computational models of the retina (the first stage of visual processing in the brain) perform poorly at predicting responses to natural images. To address this gap, Niru is building nonlinear, adaptive models of retinal function, developing computational methods for fitting and analyzing such models, and utilizing these to unravel how the retina encodes natural stimuli. This will fundamentally advance our knowledge of the relationship between nonlinear, non-stationary sensory processing and non-Gaussian stimuli in the natural world.