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 PhD 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
Postdoctoral Associate
Co-supervised by Dr. Taylor Schmitz
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.
Jinkang (Derrick) Xiang
Postgraduate Researcher
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.
Lab Alumni
Postdocs
Geoffrey Ngo, Postdoctoral Associate (2022-2024)
— Data analyst
Aedan Yue Li, BrainsCAN Postdoctoral Fellow (2023)
— Data scientist
Daria Proklova, Postdoctoral Associate (2021-2022)
— Data analyst
Graduate students
Ehsan Tousi, MSc & PhD student in Neuroscience (2019-2026)
— Data scientist
Jinkang (Derrick) Xiang, MSc & PhD student in Neuroscience (2020-2025)
— Postgraduate Researcher at Western University
Reebal Rafeh, PhD student in Neuroscience (2020-2025)
— Postdoctoral Associate at Western University
Justin Zhou, MSc student in Neuroscience (2022-2025)
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
Geetika Gupta, MSc student in Neuroscience (2019-2021)
— Medical student at the University of Melbourne
Undergraduate students and volunteers
Samuel Marshall, BSc student, Honours Specialization in Psychology (2025)
Farzad Shayanfar, Research Volunteer (2022 – 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)