Prof. Mackenzie Mathis

CIS – “Get to know your neighbors” Seminar Series

“Using mice and machine learning to understand cortical contributions to forelimb motor adaptation”

Mackenzie Mathis, Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience and an assistant professor within the Brain Mind Institute, Center for Neuroprosthetics, and Center for Intelligent Systems

Monday December 14, 2020 – 3:15 – 4:15pm (CET)

Mackenzie Mathis

Understanding how sensorimotor cortex enables motor learning and control is a crucial challenge in neuroscience: it has important implications for brain-machine-interfaces (BMIs), neuro-rehabilitation, and in neurological disease research.

In this talk I will discuss our progress in making a mouse motor of forelimb adaptation. I will also discuss advances in behavioral tasks, computer vision for markerless pose estimation, and our efforts and modeling and measuring sensory information in cortical circuits. 

Mackenzie Mathis is the Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience and an assistant professor within the Brain Mind Institute, Center for Neuroprosthetics, and Center for Intelligent Systems, as well as an EPFL ELLIS Unit Member (and ELLIS Fellow), having joined EPFL in August 2020 after moving her lab from Harvard University where she held the Rowland Fellowship.

Her lab works on mechanisms underlying adaptive behavior in intelligent systems. Specifically, the laboratory combines machine learning, computer vision, and experimental work in rodents with the combined goal of understanding the neural basis of adaptive motor control, which may lead to new avenues in therapeutic research for neurological disease. Her work has recently been featured in the news at Bloomberg BusinessWeekNature, and The Atlantic.