Juri Minxha, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral scientist, working at Cedars-Sinai, Columbia University, and Caltech

juri_photo.png

Current address:

Zuckerman Institute

3227 Broadway

New York, NY 10027

I am a neuroscientist studying memory and decision-making in humans using electrophysiological techniques. My academic background (Sc.B. and Sc.M. from Brown University) is in electrical engineering, with a specialization in statistical signal processing. Upon enrolling in the Computation and Neural Systems Ph.D. program at Caltech, I initially worked on developing invasive neural prosthetics that used spiking activity from neurons in the posterior parietal cortex of a human subject to control a robotic limb. I later worked with Drs. Ralph Adolphs and Ueli Rutishauser on understanding visual and memory representations in the medial temporal lobe using single-cell recordings from epilepsy patients.

I am currently based in New York, where I lead a collaboration between the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and Caltech. The scientific goal of this collaboration is to understand what kind of representational changes reflect the acquisition of abstract knowledge at the neural level. Our approach builds on recent work in non-human primates which has shown that neural representations supporting abstraction have specific geometric properties, as measured from the activity of populations of neurons recorded in the hippocampus and in the prefrontal cortex.

My long-term research interests lie in representation learning (in both humans and machines), specifically in how we represent the world around us in such a way that allows for maximal flexibility and generalization to new situations. I am interested in studying these questions using human electrophysiology, large-scale behavioral experiments on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, and artificial neural networks.

selected publications

  1. Flexible recruitment of memory-based choice representations by the human medial frontal cortex
    Minxha, Juri, Adolphs, Ralph, Fusi, Stefano, Mamelak, Adam N, and Rutishauser, Ueli
    Science 2020
  2. Fixations gate species-specific responses to free viewing of faces in the human and macaque amygdala
    Minxha, Juri, Mosher, Clayton, Morrow, Jeremiah K, Mamelak, Adam N, Adolphs, Ralph, Gothard, Katalin M, and Rutishauser, Ueli
    Cell reports 2017
  3. Making decisions based on autobiographical memories
    Minxha, Juri, and Rutishauser, Ueli
    Neuron 2015