About the authors

Ganchao plays around with stats / ML / AI, mainly motivated by and applied to neuroscience. He is currently into deep generative models (diffusion-/flow-based) and causal representation learning.

I completed my MD-PhD training at Duke University and pursued my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at John Pearson's lab. From a research standpoint, I am interested in developing new deep generative models tailored towards addressing specific problems in neuroscience and biomedical research. Clinically, I will be pursuing my diagnostic radiology residency training at the University of Washington (Seattle) and am super excited to continue to merge my interests in diagnostic imaging and machine learning/AI! To learn a bit more about my other projects, please visit my personal website.

I am a computational neuroethologist who enjoys thinking about learning (behavioral, neural, machine). I'm passionate about teaching and mentorship, and have taught classes ranging from "Introduction to Python" to "Probabilistic Machine Learning". Outside of work I love cooking, bouldering, playing older video games (currently Crash Bandicoot), and hanging out with my dog. Please reach out if you'd like to chat, or if you have any good movie recommendations! To learn more about my other projects, please visit my personal website.

Shiyang is a graduate student in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Duke. She received her Bsc in Applied Mathematics from University of Liverpool and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research focuses on developing computational models and real-time methods to understand the activity of large-scale neural populations. When not doing research she enjoys music, reading, and creative writing.

John earned his bachelor's degree in physics and math from the University of Kentucky and his PhD in physics from Princeton. He became a neuroscientist at Duke, where he did his postdoctoral training with Michael Platt, working on the neurobiology of reward and decision-making. From 2015 to 2018, he was an Assistant Research Professor in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. In 2018, he moved back to the School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, and in 2022, he moved to the Department of Neurobiology, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2025. In addition, he maintains secondary appointments in the departments of Biostatics & Bioinformatics, Psychology & Neuroscience, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. (cv)