Mitchell B Slapik

Hello! I'm an MD/PhD candidate at McGovern Medical School, originally from Austin. Psychiatric illness is one of the hardest problems in medicine, sitting at the intersection of genetics, neural circuits, lived experience, and society. I use machine learning and computational modeling to untangle these forces and bring greater precision to psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. More broadly, I believe this work illuminates longstanding questions about the mind, suffering, and meaning.

I am supported by an NIH F30 Fellowship and a TL1 Translational and Clinical Science Predoctoral Fellowship. My dissertation, Vision: More than Meets the Eye, examines parallels between biological and artificial intelligence in visual processing. My work has been published in Neural Computation, Journal of Vision, and Cerebellum, with an additional manuscript under review at Nature Neuroscience. Before my doctoral training, I studied philosophy in the Honors Program at Swarthmore College and worked as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins University. Alongside my research, I have worked as a crisis counselor and shadowed extensively in inpatient psychiatry. I am currently applying to research-track psychiatry residency programs.