Naoki Hiratani, Ph.D. — Principal investigator
Naoki Hiratani is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University in St Louis. He was previously a Swartz Postdoctoral Fellow in Haim Sompolinsky lab at the Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, working on the neural mechanism of structured knowledge processing, and synaptic credit assignment in the mammalian cerebellum and the octopus vertical lobe. Before that, he was a Research Assistant/Fellow in Peter Latham lab at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, where he studied the development and evolution of olfactory systems, perturbation-based learning of deep neural networks, and behavioral analysis of the International Brain Laboratory experiment. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo for his work in Tomoki Fukai lab at RIKEN Brain Science Institute on phenomenological and normative models of dendritic synaptic plasticity and learning in recurrent neural networks.
Pan Ye-Li — Postdoctoral Research Associate
Pan Ye-Li is a postdoctoral research associate in the Hiratani lab, where he investigates how information about time, space, and objects is integrated into episodic memories in the brain through mathematical modeling of hippocampal neuronal data. He got his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona under the supervision of Dr. Alex Roxin, focusing on modeling a novel plasticity rule found in mice hippocampus called the Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity.
pyeli@wustl.edu
Chang Yin — Research Assistant
She is a bioinformatics research assistant currently studying the neural origins of individual variability in mice. She obtained her Bachelor's degree in mathematics from UC Davis and her Master's degree in mathematics from Washington University.
chang.yin@wustl.edu
Liangyu Li — Rotation Student
He is a graduate student in the Computational and Data Sciences Program, currently studying biologically plausible credit assignment. He obtained his Master's degree in Computer Science from Georgetown University and in Physics from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
l.liangyu@wustl.edu
Alumni
Luke Long — Rotation student (2024)
He is a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program and is interested in computational and theoretical neuroscience, specifically information processing theory. He obtained Bachelor's degrees in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Arkansas.
Tianhong Tang — Rotation student (2023)
He is a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program and previously obtained his Bachelor’s degree in physics from Peking University. His primary interest is computational and theoretical neuroscience, especially memory and cognition.