About Me

I’m Grace Lindsay. I’m a computational neuroscientist and author.

I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science at New York University. You can visit my lab website here.

After a BS in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh and a year at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Freiburg, Germany, I got my PhD at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in the lab of Ken Miller. You can read about my thesis here. After that, I was a Sainsbury Wellcome Centre/Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit Research Fellow at University College London.

My work uses artificial neural networks to understand the brain. I am particularly interested in studying the control and effects of attention on sensory processing. I also hope to pursue the “meta-science” question of whether or not the tools we use to make sense of neural activity are actually up to the task.

As faculty in the Center for Data Science I am also intent on helping students have real world impact by applying data science to real problems. To that end, I am particularly focused on machine learning for climate change applications (for example, through my work with Earthshot Institute).

I’ve also written a popular science book about how and why we use mathematics to understand the brain. It’s called Models of the Mind: How physics, engineering and mathematics have shaped our understanding of the brain. More info on the book and how to get it here.