Mitchell B Slapik

I am an MD/PhD candidate at McGovern Medical School and a systems and computational neuroscientist interested in how brain activity gives rise to behavior and how these approaches can help us understand psychiatric illness.

During my PhD in Valentin Dragoi's laboratory, I used large-scale electrophysiology in nonhuman primates to study how behavioral state changes neural representation and communication between visual and prefrontal cortex. I have also studied biological and artificial neural representations using computational models and human 7-T fMRI. My work has appeared in Neural Computation and Journal of Vision, with a manuscript accepted in principle at Nature Neuroscience. Before my PhD, I studied cognitive and neuropsychiatric manifestations of cerebellar ataxia at Johns Hopkins University.

I now hope to bring systems and computational neuroscience to psychiatry. I am particularly interested in why patients with the same diagnosis can follow different courses and respond differently to treatment, and in using longitudinal clinical data, neuroimaging, and computational models to understand the mechanisms that drive relapse, recovery, and treatment response. My research has been supported by a TL1 Translational and Clinical Science Predoctoral Fellowship and an NIH F30 Fellowship. Before medicine, I studied philosophy in the Honors Program at Swarthmore College.