aBOUT ME

"Sapere aude" - Immanuel Kant

The brain mediates our relationship with the world. Through it, we can survive, experience, and wonder about our place in the universe. However, we do not know how it works. The human brain is composed of billions of neurons with thousands of cell types and morphologies, segregating different neurotransmitters that can propel or neglect activation while at the same time sharing information with the whole body, exchanging connections to subcortical structures, muscles, limbs, heart, guts, etc. 

Despite the myriad of components and the challenge of understanding them, nowadays, thousands of labs and scientists around the world collaborate and use different experimental techniques such as tract tracing, functional and diffusion MRI, two-photon calcium imaging, and optogenetic stimulation to little-by-little match the pieces together and answer the questions about how the brain works.

Nevertheless, despite all the advances, there are no clear directions about how to place all the knowledge and evidence together into a unified mathematical framework. Without a mathematical framework, we will likely continue making small steps, leading us to the answer, but at a slow pace. Moreover, we will lack the predictability to envision new ways of manipulating and taking advantage of brain computations. The point we are now at in neuroscience is familiar to human history. The same happened before the unification of other branches, such as thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. It was just once the system was described by mathematical equations that we were able to manipulate and create moving machines, communicate through electric signals, or envision novel devices as the transistor that was predicted many years before its synthesis.

We are in an exciting moment in history where the puzzle about how the brain works is still unsolved. I am interested in studying the brain using data from diverse experiments to discover novel ways to describe its functions, contributing through experimental ideas that will allow us to move forward, vision how these ideas can contribute in other areas such as machine learning, and how they could impact the development of medical treatments for brain diseases.