about | 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 give rise to behavior. I want to bring these approaches to understanding psychiatric illness.

During my PhD in Valentin Dragoi's laboratory, I used large-scale electrophysiology in nonhuman primates to study how behavioral state modulates communication between visual and prefrontal cortex, in work accepted in principle at Nature Neuroscience. I have also developed computational models of vision, with publications in Neural Computation and the Journal of Vision. My research has been supported by NIH F30 and TL1 fellowships. Before medicine, I studied philosophy in the Honors Program at Swarthmore College and the neuropsychiatric consequences of cerebellar disease at Johns Hopkins University.

In psychiatry, I am interested in why patients with similar symptoms can follow different courses and respond differently to treatment. I hope to use computational methods and neuroimaging to better understand these differences and predict clinical outcomes. My current research examines recovery and subsequent vulnerability in longitudinal cohorts.

selected publications

Increased Visuo-Frontal Communication Enhances Environmental Representation During Locomotion

Russell Milton*, Mitchell Slapik*, Sergey Egranov, and 4 more authors

Nature Neuroscience 2026

Bib

@article{MS_locomotion_2026,
  author = {Milton*, Russell and Slapik*, Mitchell and Egranov, Sergey and Parajuli, Arun and Franch, Melissa and McConnell, Alexandra and Dragoi, Valentin},
  title = {Increased Visuo-Frontal Communication Enhances Environmental Representation During Locomotion},
  journal = {Nature Neuroscience},
  year = {2026},
  annotation = {* Equal contribution}
}

Simulated Complex Cells Contribute to Object Recognition Through Representational Untangling

Mitchell Slapik, and Harel Shouval

Neural Computation 2026

Bib HTML PDF

@article{MS_untangling_2026,
  author = {Slapik, Mitchell and Shouval, Harel},
  title = {Simulated Complex Cells Contribute to Object Recognition Through Representational Untangling},
  journal = {Neural Computation},
  year = {2026},
}

Neuropsychiatric Symptoms as a Reliable Phenomenology of Cerebellar Ataxia

Sharif Kronemer, Mitchell Slapik, Jessica Pietrowski, and 6 more authors

The Cerebellum 2021

Bib HTML PDF

@article{MS_neuropsych_2021,
  author = {Kronemer, Sharif and Slapik, Mitchell and Pietrowski, Jessica and Margron, Michael and Morgan, Owen and Bakker, Catherine and Rosenthal, Liana and Onyike, Chiadi and Marvel, Cherie},
  title = {Neuropsychiatric Symptoms as a Reliable Phenomenology of Cerebellar Ataxia},
  journal = {The Cerebellum},
  year = {2021},
}