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Perfect Pitch

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Today I competed in the Perfect Pitch 2016 competition at University of Washington – and I won first place in my division!

This competition brought together students and researchers from four different institutes that are affiliated with the Washington Research Foundation (WRF). Participants were expected to describe their research in under a minute and a half with the aid of just a single powerpoint slide. The idea was to communicate your research to a general audience by clearly and succinctly describing the problem or scientific question that your research seeks to address, what you’re doing to try and solve that problem, and what kind of impact your research might have.

Communicating about science is a difficult task, and trying to do it in under 90 seconds without using jargon is an even greater one. I found the challenge very instructive and exciting, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to give it a try.

PerfectPitchSlide_ggutierrez

How to build a spiking predictive coding model

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These notes are the first of many illustrated notes about my research, and science in general, that I will post.

This is An illustrated primer on constructing a circuit from optimization (click the link for the pdf). It details the approach I’ve used in my most recent research while I was a postdoc in Sophie Deneve’s lab at the Group for Neural Theory in Paris, France. I was working with Sophie’s predictive coding network with spiking neurons, so if you’re interested in the work from her paper (Boerlin, et al, PLoS, 2013), this closely follows their machine-learning-inspired approach to constructing a neural network of spiking units.

Good news

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Today, I found out that I was awarded a WRF Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neuroengineering. I’m going to Seattle, WA to be a postdoc at University of Washington and I couldn’t be happier!

Also, I’m going to the Cosyne 2016 meeting and workshops. I hope to catch up with many of my friends and colleagues – and to also do a little snowboarding.