Marieke Mur
Principal Investigator
Marieke’s work brings together psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to understand how the human brain supports perception and cognition. She studied cognitive neuroscience at Maastricht University, and completed a Ph.D. with Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and Peter Bandettini at the National Institutes of Health. She performed her postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge with John Duncan, supported by fellowships from the Dutch Research Council and the British Academy.
Reebal Rafeh
PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Taylor Schmitz and Dr. Ali Khan
Reebal’s research focuses on the interaction between incoming visual signals and internal task states. His projects use advanced functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques to examine how selective attention affects visual population codes. Before joining the lab, Reebal completed his MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht.
Ehsan Tousi
PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Mark Daley
Ehsan studies how we learn to make sense of the outside visual world. His project examines how learning goals affect representation learning in deep convolutional neural networks, and identifies which learning goals lead to human-like object representations. Ehsan completed two MSc degrees before joining the PhD program: Communication Systems Engineering at Shahid Beheshti University and Neuroscience at Western University.
Jinkang (Derrick) Xiang
PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo and Dr. Joern Diedrichsen
Derrick aims to integrate computational and neuroscience approaches to better understand how neural computations in prefrontal cortex support human perception, cognition and action. His current project involves assessing the feasibility of measuring prefrontal population codes with advanced functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques by characterizing their spatiotemporal scale. Before joining the lab, Derrick obtained his BEng in Computer Science and BSc in Mathematics from Sichuan University, China.
Chelsea Kim
PhD student, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Co-supervised by Dr. Ken McRae
Chelsea’s research aims to elucidate how we learn about object animacy. She wants to understand how the infant brain represents the distinction between living and nonliving objects and which aspects of an object — visual appearance, biological motion, or agentic (goal-directed, non-random) motion — are necessary for learning about animacy. She uses self-supervised deep neural networks as computational models of object learning. Prior to joining the lab, Chelsea completed her MSc in Computational Systems Neuroscience at McGill University.
Farzad Shayanfar
Volunteer
Farzad joined the lab as a volunteer, working on 3D stimulus creation and augmentations using a variety of software packages and 3D libraries including Unreal and Unity engines. He also works on automated large scale 3D dataset creation, data preprocessing and utility solutions to measure neural network performance in 3D environments. Farzad completed his MSc in Neurophysiology at Shahid Beheshti University and has work experience as a research assistant at the IPM. He works as a freelance programmer and 3D designer in Iran.
Lab Alumni
Postdocs and graduate students
Geoffrey Ngo, Postdoctoral Associate (2022-2024)
— Data Analyst
Aedan Yue Li, BrainsCAN Postdoctoral Fellow (2023)
— Data Scientist, TD Bank
Daria Proklova, Postdoctoral Associate (2021-2022)
— Data Analyst
Justin Zhou, MSc student in Neuroscience (2022-2025)
— applying to PhD Programs in Clinical Psychology
Haider Al-Tahan, MSc student in Neuroscience (2021-2023)
— PhD student at Georgia Tech
Aida Mirebrahimi, MSc student in Computer Science (2022-2023)
— PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University
Ehsan Tousi, MSc student in Neuroscience (2019-2021)
— PhD student at Western University
Geetika Gupta, MSc student in Neuroscience (2019-2021)
— Medical student at the University of Melbourne
Undergraduate students
Samuel Marshall, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Psychology (2025)
Justin Zhou, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Psychology (2022)
Megan Arsenault, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Psychology (2021)
Cem Torun, BSc student, Western USRI Program (2020)
Cheng Chen, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Computer Science (2020)
Aadam Ali, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Computer Science (2020)
Jason Chung, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Computer Science (2020)