Mitchell B Slapik

I am an MD/PhD candidate at McGovern Medical School and a systems and computational neuroscientist studying how patterns of neural activity shape behavior. I hope to use the same tools to 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, and a manuscript from my PhD has been accepted in principle at Nature Neuroscience. Before my PhD, I studied the cognitive and neuropsychiatric manifestations of cerebellar ataxia at Johns Hopkins University.

I now want to bring systems and computational neuroscience to psychiatry. Patients who share a diagnosis can follow different courses and respond differently to treatment. A score tells you where a patient is, not how they got there. I am interested in understanding those trajectories: what changes before relapse, what distinguishes recovery, and why the same treatment helps one patient but not another.

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. It still shapes the questions I ask about the brain and human behavior.