Postdocs: Caltech, CMU

Following my PhD I went for a postdoctoral at Caltech with Christof Koch. With Christof I worked on computational neuroscience models of neural activity (my physicist friend Zeev Olami helped here too; sadly Zeev died of a brain tumour few years later; he is greatly missed), which I then developed together with Ernst Niebur and Martin Stemmler to bridge between physiology and psychophysics. Working in Christof’s lab was both inspiring and formative. One of the first things I noticed when I joined his lab was a note on his door saying: “either you can have a job done or you can’t; everything else is just wimpy”. Also, it was not unusual to come to the lab at midnight and find about half of the people still working or even sleeping for an hour or so on a mattress, before getting back to it. We did have fun, though, and not only with the science. Diverse food, films and surely the Venice beach that remains one of my favourites. After Caltech, I did a second postdoc at CMU with Jay McClelland and Jonathan Cohen. They were both excellent guides to rigorous research that comes from a deep commitment to knowledge, and I got an excellent opportunity to go deeper in cognitive theory and to link it with neurocomputational models. Also I started, together with Jay, to examine the dynamics of evidence integration and decision-making — my main research field today and together with Jonathan we examined the cognitive role of the Noradrenaline system in attentional regulation.