Profiles

Dr. Mario Dipoppa seeks to understand the neural mechanisms underlying cortical brain functions. He obtained his Ph.D. at Pierre and Marie Curie University where he developed neural circuit models underlying working memory, under the guidance of Boris Gutkin. He then joined as a postdoc in the laboratory of Kenneth Harris and Matteo Carandini at University College London and was the recipient of the Marie Curie Fellowship. As a postdoc, Dr. Dipoppa combined large-scale neural recordings and computational models to study the mouse visual system. He then served as an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience of Columbia University advised by Ken Miller. There, he combined deep learning with dynamical systems methods to study fundamental properties of visual computations. Dr. Dipoppa’s computational neuroscience laboratory continues to investigate how neural networks and dynamics in the cerebral cortex give rise to neural computation. Despite the complexity of their operations, cortical circuits are stereotypical which may underlie common computations. To discover the governing principles of these canonical circuits, Dr. Dipoppa’s laboratory combines state-of-the-art approaches, including biologically realistic neural networks, artificial (deep and recurrent) neural networks, and encoding and decoding models.