Cowley Lab
Principal Investigator: Benjamin Cowley
Institution: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor, NY)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students
Research Focus
To understand how a neuron contributes to behavior, neuroscientists rely on a diverse set of tools and techniques to perturb neural responses and observe changes in behavior. As the amount of neural perturbation data rapidly grows, new methods are needed to build models that both incorporate and explain this neural perturbation data. We recently developed knockout training, a new machine learning method that, at its core, perturbs or “knocks out” model units of neural network models in the same way neurons are inactivated in the brain; models are trained on behavioral data from animals with neural perturbations, and the models learn how neurons both represent sensory information and drive motor behaviors. We will expand and improve this method, and thereby generate general-purpose knockout training algorithms widely applicable and available to the systems neuroscience community. To evaluate knockout training’s ability to estimate one-to-one mappings, we model neural systems in Drosophila melanogaster, chosen for its highly-structured anatomy, wealth of genetic and perturbation tools, rich natural behaviors, and available connectomes. An important advance of the proposed research is…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01DA063413-01: New methods to identify one-to-one mappings between neural network models and brain neurons (2026)
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