Supervision of graduate/undergraduate research

I am a supervisor in McGill’s Integrated Program in Neuroscience. You can find me in the IPN supervisor database here. I am also a supervisor for the Quantitative Life Sciences program. You can find my supervisor page here. I am happy to be contacted as a potential supervisor for undergraduate research projects, for example NSCI 396/410/420/430 or COGS 396/401/444.

Lab Skills and Training

Most research projects in my lab involve collecting psychophysical data from human subjects. We use experiment software to create visual tasks, and to measure the decisions made by subjects performing those tasks. These data are then analysed, which may also involve the application of mathematical or computational models.

Therefore, research projects in my lab may appeal to students interested in:

  • Learning about human vision, and how it can be studied through the quantitative behavioural approach known as psychophysics.
  • Beginning to learn, or improving their experiment programming skills. The experiments are usually programmed in Matlab/Octave (using Psychtoolbox) or Python (using PsychoPy). For some projects, we instead use Unity/C# (e.g. to develop apps or perform experiments in virtual/augmented reality).
  • Beginning to learn, or improving their data analysis programming skills. The experiments are usually analysed in Matlab/Octave or Python (using Jupyter notebooks).
  • Learning how we can use mathematical or computational models to help us understand how the brain solves visual tasks.
  • Improving their scientific writing and conference presentation skills.

McGill Vision Research and the BRaIN Program

My lab is part of both McGill Vision Research and the RI-MUHC BRaIN Program. McGill Vision Research is a close-knit group of eight principal investigators and around thirty students and postdoctoral fellows. We meet on a weekly basis (Friday at 1pm) for the McGill Vision Research journal club, which is coordinated through a mailing list. The Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience (BRaIN) Program is a much larger group of over 125 principal investigators and their trainees. The BRaIN Program hosts a weekly seminar series (Wednesday at 12pm) with invited speakers giving presentations on experimental neuroscience.