Hello! I'm an MD/PhD student at McGovern Medical School interested in psychiatry and computational neuroscience. Originally from Austin, I studied philosophy at Swarthmore College, and worked as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins.
Then, I came to the Medical Scientist Training Program at UT, where I have been supported by the NIH through a National Research Service Award and a Translational and Clinical Science Predoctoral Fellowship.
Ultimately, I hope to use computational neuroscience to better understand and treat psychiatric disorders. Find more information below:
According to dynamical systems, psychiatric disorders can be seen as energy landscapes with peaks and valleys. OCD has deep valleys where neural activity gets stuck, while schizophrenia has shallow valleys that let neural activity roam too freely, connecting unrelated ideas. pic.twitter.com/Ajypur5XIM
— Mitchell B. Slapik (@mslapik) November 24, 2024
Motor cortex generates outputs while keeping track of its place in a sequence. To do this, it must avoid intersections, such as the center of a figure-8, where it could get off-track. A majority of motor cortex prevents these intersections, rather than encoding motor variables. pic.twitter.com/mJ9DkkF5jg
— Mitchell B. Slapik (@mslapik) October 12, 2024
Communication subspaces enable the brain to selectively send different signals to different brain regions. Here, neuron 3 computes the sum of neurons 1 and 2, whereas neuron 4 computes their difference. In this way, neurons 3 and 4 can trace out completely independent patterns. pic.twitter.com/9iz9nsiEoS
— Mitchell B. Slapik (@mslapik) January 7, 2024
Check out our live performance at the World-Famous @RandRStudioLive, available here: https://t.co/TdgeB09lTG pic.twitter.com/xTnfvkaqg2
— The Chirp Chirps (@TheChirpChirps) May 21, 2023
Thanks everyone for coming out to our reunion show last week at Valhalla! The Chirp Chirps are Back! pic.twitter.com/fLK5ZmCl9v
— The Chirp Chirps (@TheChirpChirps) November 17, 2023